


The Stranger I Am

by Cyberwraith9



Series: These Strange Days [2]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Ambiguous Relationships, Coming of Age, Developing Relationship, Enemies, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Homeworld Gems - Freeform, Implied Connie Maheswaran/Steven Universe, Saving the World, Slice of Life, Summer Vacation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2019-07-21 02:13:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16150382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyberwraith9/pseuds/Cyberwraith9
Summary: In the wake of a terrible loss, Connie struggles to cope with the new changes in her life and herself. And along the way, she might have to save the world from the invasion of Shard and her rebel Gems. It's going to be a busy summer!





	1. Wake Up

  
Cover by [MJStudioArts](http://mjstudioarts.tumblr.com/)

"Connie? It's time to wake up."

Rolling onto her side, Connie pulled her face out of her pillow and cracked one eyelid. The light of a summer morning stabbed her in the pupil, too bright even through her room's closed blinds and drawn curtains. Connie groaned and clapped her palm over her eye, feeling her aching and fuzzy head throb. "Mmgnh?" she groaned in the direction of the doorway. "Whhtihmizit?"

"Good morning," her mother answered. "Though in about an hour, that would be 'good afternoon.' You should get up and eat something."

Not so long ago, the words would have been an instruction, not a suggestion. That tiny change in their dynamic probably said more about Connie's pitifulness than anything else. Connie rolled back onto her face and grumbled, ""Mmnnnodunghry."

The springs in her mattress creaked, and her bed shifted with her mother's weight next to her. A hand gently stroked her long, knotted hair. "I know you're not, but you need to eat anyway. You need to get out of your room." Sounds of delicate sniffing filled a short beat, and then her mother added, "And you also need to take a shower."

"Ayyyygnowwwww…"

A long sigh feathered the back of Connie's head. "I have to leave for my shift soon. Come downstairs and eat something in front of me so I know you got something in your stomach today." A light kiss pressed into Connie's scalp through her hair before her mother's weight creaked off the bed. "Blech. But first: shower."

Footsteps padded out of the room. After a quiet hesitation, the door creaked shut. It wasn't until her mother's footsteps had faded down the stairs that Connie managed to roll off her face and onto her back. The ceiling stared back at her, empty and blank.

Connie knew her parents were worried about her. She knew they had good reason to be worried. It had been eight days since the Battle of Ascension, which was an overly dramatic name for what had amounted to a scuffle between a handful of Gems on an abandoned mountaintop, but since the "Scuffle of Ascension" sounded even goofier, she stuck with the first name. In those eight days, Connie had cried, and raged, and remembered, and had spent sleepless nights plumbing the corners of her own mind for signs of non-Connie thoughts or feelings. But she had found nothing. And after the pain of loss had faded, she felt nothing.

Well, not nothing-nothing,  _per se_. But her emotions had cooled and congealed into a lifeless, colorless blob that hung on her like an anchor. With this invisible blob weighing her down, it felt harder to move or think. She was sleeping more, sometimes for an entire day, only to wake up exhausted.

She didn't want to worry her parents, but she didn't know how to make things better. She didn't know if she could feel better anymore. And that should have worried her too. But it couldn't. The feeling-blob didn't do worry. It only did heavy.

Taking a long, deep breath, Connie choked, and agreed with her mother one at least one point: she needed a shower. She rolled until her feet struck carpet and then shambled toward her bathroom.

While the shower water heated up, Connie peeled out of her pajamas, which smelled almost as bad as she did. Before she had turned thirteen, the idea of becoming a teenager had seemed like a grand transformation of maturity, wisdom, and feminine mystique on the horizon. Now that she had reached it, the reality of it seemed to be mostly sweating.

Cradling her pajama shirt, Connie stared at the cheery yellow star ironed into its pink fabric. Steven never seemed sweaty. Even after a hard training session, he didn't really  _sweat_  as much as  _glow_.

The pajama shirt had been one of his numberless everyday shirts, borrowed from his wardrobe and never returned. Beneath her own funk, Connie could still detect a hint of sea spray and powdered sugar that Steven always seemed to smell like. She started to put the shirt in the bathroom's laundry hamper, but then paused, and tossed it onto the counter instead. It still had a little bit of its comforting magic left in it before the next wash. And as fitfully as she'd slept while wearing the shirt, she was afraid of how badly she might sleep without it.

By the time she finished sluicing off her teenage stank, the bathroom was thick with steam. She climbed out of the shower with her towel wrapped around herself and another towel wrapping up her wet, tangled mass of hair. As her hands moved on autopilot, brushing her teeth and rolling on deodorant, she realized that she did feel the tiniest bit lighter. Being clean, feeling clean, made a bigger difference than she'd thought.

Then she found herself holding her blow dryer as she tilted the towel wrapping off her head. The instant it turned on, blasting her face with warm air, she felt her stomach clench and dropped the dryer, jerking back. It clattered to rest on the counter with a steady stream of air belching from its nozzle.

She stared at the hairdryer, its electric whirr filling the room. Even as she fought the impulse, her stare was drawn up to the broad mirror above the sink. She tried not to look, but the fight was hopeless, and she knew it. Her gaze came to rest on the muddied reflection lurking under the thick, runny fog clinging to the mirror. A flash of color peered back at her through the fog, and even though she begged herself not to, she wiped the condensation from the mirror.

In her smeared reflection, Connie saw the square shape of the gemstone beneath her throat, its rounded sides peeking out from the top of her towel wrap. Its deep green color glimmered back at her with the rise and fall of her breathing. When she reached up to grip the stone, she could feel it still firmly rooted to her sternum, its boxy shape resisting her pull.

_"I had been working on a farewell gift, but assumed I would have more time. It was almost complete, but now… Well, perhaps you will find it and finish it for me."_

Connie stared at the stone, the only remains of Jade. She had spent days tearing apart her room to find whatever gift the Gem had mentioned. She had looked through every file on her computer. And when nothing new had revealed itself, she had been forced to conclude that the gemstone was the only thing left behind. That, and her own body, free of the corruption Jade had taken with her when she had given up her physical form.

Whole and healthy, Connie had been given a second lease on life. Connie had defied all odds, and even her own promises to Jade, and had come through their shared ordeal intact. And Connie couldn't feel more miserable for the accomplishment.

Twisting away from the mirror, Connie jerked the hairdryer's plug from the wall, stilling its warm wind. She dressed and left the bathroom with a tangle of wet hair at her back and the dryer resting in a puddle of her towel on the floor.

Her mother waited for her in the kitchen, already dressed for work and wearing her lab coat. There was a plate of toast with jelly and a bowl of fresh fruit on the table next to a glass of orange juice, all of it for Connie. As Connie sat down, she saw her mother surreptitiously set aside a hairbrush at the sight of her daughter's soggy hair and try to hide a look of worry.

"Thanks, Mom," Connie mumbled. She took a bite of the toast and forced herself to swallow. The bite crawled down her throat like a centipede made of sandpaper.

A little smile crossed her mother's lips. "Much better," she said, and nodded. Then, pretending to remember, she grabbed a brown cardboard box off the countertop, clearly placed there so she could present it as soon as Connie arrived. "Oh, and we got a package this morning too," she said, and slid the box across the table to Connie.

Grateful for an excuse to ignore her breakfast, Connie pulled the box closer. The tape was already broken, so she pulled the top of the box apart. Inside she found two short stacks of paperback books, their covers old-timey and featuring words like  _Classics_  and  _Canon_. "Books?" she said.

"We got your summer reading list from the school's website and ordered them from Bookézoid. The minimum requirement was to just read three off the list, but your father and I figured you for an advanced reader." A twinkle lit her eye as she peered down into the box and added, "But I thought I saw something odd at the bottom…"

Connie slid the books apart and saw a sliver of something dark and starry at the very bottom of the box. Finding an edge with her fingers, she pulled it out to reveal a glossy pamphlet. It had a picture of a starfield surrounding a NASA logo, and was headed with two words that made Connie's eyes huge as she read them aloud. "Space Camp?"

When she looked up, her mother had a coy smile waiting for her. "How did that get in there? It must be a mistake," she said, her tone too serious to be genuine.

An old excitement flickered briefly inside of Connie as she stared at the pamphlet. "But you always said I was too young," Connie insisted, hardly daring to believe that her mother wasn't playing a joke on her, as unlikely a thing as her mother pranking anyone might be.

"Well, no matter how much I don't like it, you keep insisting on getting older," her mother said. The tiniest of cracks appeared in her façade, and she admitted, "And your father and I both agree that you can handle a lot more than we ever realized. We think you're mature enough to spend two weeks getting sick in a centrifuge if that's what you really want."

Connie fought to keep her own smile intact. "Thanks, Mom," she heard herself say.

Composure returning, her mother tapped the cardboard box. "But that pamphlet's at the bottom of your reading list, understand? Once you've finished those books, we will all sit down and talk about what happens next."

"That seems perfectly reasonable," Connie said, nodding sagely as she pretended to agree.

Her mother gave her a long, searching look, but then nodded in return. She collected her purse and keys, and then hesitated. Stepping close, she planted a long, lingering kiss in Connie's wet hair. "I love you, Connie. Call me if you need anything. Okay?"

"I will. I love you, Mom." Connie rose and hugged her mother tightly. And she even managed to keep her smile in place until her mother closed the front door from the other side. Once the lock clicked, though, her mouth sagged again.

Releasing a long, stale breath, Connie dropped back into her chair and looked at the pamphlet again. Not that long ago she would have relished the chance to train with real astronauts, to be trusted to spend two whole weeks away from home with no parental supervision. Even before she had met the Gems, Space Camp had been one of her big dreams.

Now, though, any joy from the notion felt like a betrayal. How could she think about playing space explorer after a real space explorer had given up everything for her? The memories of excitement and longing for something so terrestrial now felt like a child's foolish wish.

Shaking away the memories, Connie drew the first book out of the box. If she couldn't escape the childishness of her old dreams or the misery of the present, she could at least bury it all under some school-approved literature. " _Frankenstein_? Again?" she groused as she read the cover. Then, opening to the copyright page, she brightened. "Ooh, it's the 1818 Edition! Missus Braeburn probably wants to teach the 1831 Edition in class." Since she had already read the later edition, it at least put her ahead of next year's studies.

She flipped to the first page and picked up her orange juice, determined to consume something if only for her mother's sake. But when the glass reached her lips, she paused, setting it aside to frown at the page. As soon as her eyes focused on the words, the text felt immediately familiar to her.

She started back at the first line, but as she tried to read each sentence, a sense of impatience overwhelmed her. She already knew the words. Shaking her head, she flipped to the next set of pages and continued, wondering if the two editions were actually that similar. They must have been, because as soon as her eyes focused, she realized that she already knew these pages too. Every word on the paper was as familiar to her as though she'd written them herself in that very moment.

Had she actually read this version of  _Frankenstein_  before instead of the later version? Even if she had, it had been years since she had picked up the book, and as good as Shelley's work was, she didn't remember it leaving such a lasting impression on her before. But as she flipped from page to page, she could hardly focus on the words before she realized that she knew them all by heart.

In little more than a minute, Connie flipped past the final page and close the book. She must have been mistaken about which edition she already owned. "I hope Mom isn't too mad about buying the same book twice," she said, and pushed it aside. Then she selected the next book:  _Pride and Prejudice_ , a book she definitely had never read. With a sigh, she cracked the book, resigning herself to getting through the toughest read first so the rest weren't so bad by comparison.

But as soon as her eye focused on the page, she realized that she knew these words too. Connie's frown deepened as she flipped from page to page, confused by her own recognition. The last time she had tried reading Jane Austen, it had been like trapping her brain inside a cage of itchy banality, and so she had sworn the author off. Now, though, as she skimmed through each page, it was as though she had memorized Elizabeth Bennet's high-society tribulations.

She shut the book and closed her eyes, trying to remember what came next. If she had really read Pride and Prejudice before, she would remember how it ended, wouldn't she? But as she strained to remember, she could only recall the events of the book up to the chapter she had just been reading. Everything before that, she could remember perfectly, but what came next was a mystery.

So she opened the book again and continued skimming. And as she moved from page to page, she realized that she did remember what happened. A minute later she closed the book on Elizabeth's and Mister Darcy's happy ending, bored and frustrated with their wishy-washiness, and recalling every single word of it. Had she really read it before and forgotten, only remembering now as she skimmed through it?

Then, with a spark of realization, she quickly drew the next book, a biography of Carl Sagan assigned as optional reading for her science class. She didn't normally read biographies, and knew for a fact that she had never read it before. And yet, as she flipped to each new page, she felt as though she already knew it.

But that wasn't it. Instead, she realized, Connie was reading each page as quickly as she could focus her eyes. Even without consciously examining the words, her mind was absorbing the text instantly upon seeing it. Before her toast had gone cold, Connie finished reading the entire box of books. She could recall every word of every page, and with just a moment's concentration, she could recite it back to herself without looking. She could count how many apostrophes and commas appeared in each book, and compare the number of each per page, per book, or total their numbers together, or compile a ratio of consonants to vowels, or—

She shook her head and backed out of her chair, sending it skidding across the kitchen floor. Staring at the pile of books on the table, she realized that she had just internalized her entire summer reading list in the time it would have taken any other student to finish a chapter. It was an impossible feat…for a human.

Reaching up, Connie touched the stone under her blouse. The first night she had awoken, Jade had read Connie's entire library: two full bookcases with shelves stacked two volumes deep. This new rapid speed-reading of hers seemed similar, though she'd never really been awake for any of the Gem's reading. But what did it mean that she could remember all of the books perfectly? She didn't remember anything else from the morning in that kind of detail. Would that change? Would she start remembering things she had forgotten?

She had blown Steven off his own porch with an accidental wind the night Jade had…left. But nothing had happened since. And she remembered the event like a normal memory, not like a new-book-eidetic memory. But would that change? Would her old memories start crystalizing like the books were now? Would there be room in her brain for all of it? Would she remember being a baby, or being born? Would she remember memories that weren't hers?

A tinkling sound ripped her out of her mental spiral. She looked to the corner of the kitchen and saw the wind chime strung up above the counter swaying in the still air. The three notes of the chime rang in chaotic, atonal succession. A breeze tickled the damp nape of Connie's neck, but the instant she noticed it, the air stilled again and the chimes went silent.

Connie felt her stomach curling up into a shriveled little fist underneath her heart. "Jade?" she whispered. "Jade, are you doing this?"

There were no chimes this time, and no voices in her head, and no new understand of what was happening to her.

She felt her eyes sting, and clenched her eyelids shut. "I could really use you right about now. You kind of left your body stuck in my chest. Can you please come back and help me figure out what's happening?"

Silence answered inside and out.

Her fists balled tightly at her sides, her knuckles cracking. "Please," she said, voice quavering. "Please come back. Please."

Nothing.

"Please!" she shouted into the stillness.

Her voice rattled the room, knocking her breakfast across the tabletop and throwing her orange juice into a puddle on the floor. The empty cardboard box tumbled and smacked into the refrigerator hard enough to crumple its corner. Curtains at the window billowed and snapped like flags, and the wind chime jerked against its hook, its chimes banging into each other and the clapper in a cacophony of noise.

Startled by the sudden windstorm, Connie scrambled backwards out of the room, running from the screaming notes of the wind chime. For just a second, it felt as though she were running against a hurricane gale, but she pushed through it and ran up the stairs and into her room.

The door slammed behind her, and she braced against it, chest heaving. Familiar jitters of adrenaline shivered in her nerve endings. She closed her eyes and forced her breathing to slow, concentrating on the simple physical process. In moments, her heart rate eased, and the pounding in her ears faded.

An odd weight hung in one of her hands. Looking down, she jerked in surprise to find the doorknob to her bedroom hanging broken in her hand, ripped out of its housing in the door. She didn't remember feeling the knob break away, and couldn't imagine how much effort it would have taken to manage the feat on purpose. But the broken ends of the metal were fresh and obvious, and still sharp when she tested it with her thumb.

With her wits returning, she could hear herself think again, and only one thought rang clearly in her mind. "Steven."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it has been way too long. Welcome back, everyone!
> 
> You may have noticed the swanky cover art at the top of the page. It's a commission from [MJStudioArts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MjStudioArts/pseuds/MjStudioArts), one of [ConnieSwap](https://archiveofourown.org/series/630527)'s resident writer/artists, and it turned out fantastic! Be sure to check out her [gallery](http://mjstudioarts.tumblr.com/), or if you're jealous of this awesome cover, hit up her [commissions page](http://mjstudioarts.tumblr.com/Commission)!
> 
> And if you missed it, she also did the cover for _The Stranger In Me_!  
> 
> 
> If you have any questions or thoughts, be sure to share them in the comments below. I'm hoping to take the story weekly again, but longtime readers will know how diligently I can keep _that_ promise. Still, I'm going to give it my very best. And until the next chapter arrives, I hope you like what's to come!


	2. Razzle Dazzle

"Those sound like Gem powers!" Steven exclaimed, his excitement ringing tinnily through the phone.

Connie continued flipping through the hardcover omnibus of the  _Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Novels_. In the time it had taken her to recount the morning's antics to Steven, she had paged through the majority of the book. Now she closed its back cover, and every single word of it remained in her mind with perfect clarity. "Maybe the wind stuff," Connie hedged. "But reading? That seems like a weird power."

She could practically hear him shrugging. "Gem powers can get pretty weird. Remember when we met?"

A smile cracked through Connie's worry. "I remember it a little bit," she teased.

"And that was one of the less crazy times. Wait until you turn into cats. Or a baby! You were around for that one too." His blushing was so deep that it seeped crimson and bright into his voice.

Running her hand across the smooth, glossy letters of the omnibus cover, Connie felt her smile fading. "Jade did say that she read all of my books in one night," she admitted.

"Maybe this is just your gemstone's powers coming in. Like mine came in for me!"

Memories slipped through the lids of her clenched eyes, and she relived the early days of Jade's reawakening. The bodiless Gem had only her winds to herself back then. She had been helpless, voiceless, and when Connie had traded places with her for just a few hours, it had felt like torture. Now even Jade's winds had been taken from her empty stone.

Her hand shook, raking her knuckles across the book cover. "It's not my gemstone," she muttered.

The other end of the call hung silent for a long moment. Connie silently cursed herself for saying that. Steven was trying to help her. The last thing she wanted to do was foist her mountain of guilt onto his shoulders.

Forcing her tone to brighten, she continued, "But maybe you're right. This could just be happening because the gemstone is still inside of me. I'm just worried now about what's going to happen. I mean, if I can blast a wind chime at ten paces, what else can I do?"

Steven's voice came back with even more cheer and confidence. "You just need to practice, like I did! You can get a handle on it when you come over for sword training. There's lots of air up there to blow around! Or, I guess there's air pretty much everywhere, but the only people you could knock off would be me or Pearl. And we'd be okay if we fell."

An imaginary windblown Steven floating to the ground was a pretty cute thought, far cuter than a plummeting Pearl. But then that thought made her think of the explosive nose-blowing on the night after Jade's…on the night after the battle. The next time something like that happened, her parents might be in the line of fire. "Jade used to brag that she could take a building right off its foundation. Am I gonna do that by accident?" she said, as much to herself as to Steven.

"Oh, yeah," Steven said, as if that thought hadn't occurred to him either. "It's too bad you don't live out on a beach. There's plenty of room for big mistakes without anybody getting hurt. That's why my Dad and the Gems built the house on the front of the temple. Stuff gets broken around here all the time, but it's no big deal."

Connie's mouth quirked as she tried to imagine her parents being as blasé about property damage as the Gems were. During their previous cross-country move, her father had hired movers for the furniture, and ended up with a scratch on the antique grandfather clock that had led to a weeklong argument and desperate attempts at do-it-yourself fixes that had led to more arguments and hurt feelings. If Connie accidentally blew out the windows, it would send her whole family, Connie included, into hysterics.

Frankly, everyone would be a lot safer if Connie just stayed somewhere where an accidental gust wouldn't be a tragedy, somewhere like the b—

A sudden realization struck Connie dumb. As the details of the idea took form, she realized that it was accidentally brilliant, solving almost every problem caused by these burgeoning powers all at once. It made perfect sense.

But it also felt unbelievably selfish, and ridiculous, and impossible, and it scared Connie with how much she had wanted it all along without realizing it.

Her ongoing silence made Connie realize that Steven hadn't spoken for nearly a minute either. She checked to make certain that their call hadn't dropped, and then waited to see if he would repeat some question or comment she had missed. But his wordlessness in the phone seemed to vibrate with the same kind of excitement she could feel jittering in her own body. "Steven?" she said. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I think so." He spoke in a hush, but there was a growing excitement straining to burst through the words.

Connie's heart beat faster. "Would…" She swallowed hard. "Would that be okay?" she asked, and then held her breath.

Somehow Connie could feel Steven grinning through the phone even before he shouted his enthusiastic reply directly into her ear.

* * *

"Huh. When did this happen?"

Connie watched from the corner of her eye as her father stood on tiptoe to run his thumb against the kitchen wall, feeling at a nigh-imperceptible scratch in the paint behind where the wind chime hung. She couldn't quite stifle her wince as she realized one of the chimes must have struck the wall during her windy incident—windcident?—earlier that day.

Glancing sidelong, Connie caught her mother staring curiously at her, and wondered if she had been busted already. But her mother seemed more concerned with the plateful of untouched dinner Connie was scraping into the garbage can instead. "Not in the mood for stir fry?" her mother asked.

Offering up a weak smile, Connie said, "It tasted great, Mom. I just…had a big lunch."

"Mmm-hmm," her mother hummed noncommittally, and stacked the dinner plates in the sink.

Connie's heart thundered in her ears. She wasn't eager to jump into the night's looming discussion, but anything had to be better than listening to her mother fuss over Connie's lack of appetite again. "Actually, I've kind of had something on my mind. Would it be okay if we had a family meeting?"

Now both of her parents eyed her with mild suspicion. "Family meeting" was the polite term they had always used to announce some unpleasant decision beyond Connie's control. They were the words that proceeded each new relocation, or a doctor's appointment. But this was the first time Connie had turned the phrase back on them. "Okay," her father drawled, and set aside the dirty pans from dinner.

They followed Connie into the living room and settled onto the couch. Beneath their open curiosity, Connie could sense a hint of concern. It was probably warranted, given everything they had been through in the last few months, but it made Connie nervous all the same. Luckily, she had written down her talking points and read them ahead of time, so she wouldn't forget them. Ever.

"First, thanks for coming," Connie said in what she hoped was a mature, adult tone.

"Thank you for hosting the meeting," her father replied, a tiny smile pulling at the edge of his mouth.

Her mother remained all frowns and business. "Connie, is everything alright?"

Connie steadied herself with a deep breath. That was the very question she had been dreading, and the one for which she was most prepared. Bending, she drew out the cardboard box given to her that morning and set it on the coffee table. The box's top was open, and all of her new books were neatly stacked inside it. "I finished all the books," she announced.

Concern turned to parental skepticism in her mother's expression. "Connie," she said, sounding reproachful, "I'm glad you're excited about the possibility of space camp, but we expect you to do the work before we have that discussion. It doesn't count if you skim the books and look up summaries on the internet."

She couldn't have scripted a better setup if she'd tried.  _Showtime_ , Connie told herself. Then, with a carefully straight face, she said, "You don't understand. I didn't just read all of these books. I read every book in the house today. And I know all of them."

That got the reaction she'd been looking for. Her mother shed the last of her concern to appear wholly skeptical, while her father perked up, intrigued. "Like, 'all the books,' all the books?" he asked, and looked at the bookshelf at the far end of the room.

She nodded. "Pick a book and tell me the page number," Connie told him.

Her father leaned forward and grinned. She could tell he was expecting some kind of trick or prank. Her mother, though, rose from the couch and went to the bookcase, alternatively searching through its volumes to find a suitable challenge and glancing back at Connie in confusion.

Connie's father was faster on the draw, and had a book from the box opened in front of him. "Show me what you got, Lady Library," he said, and then gave her a page number.

Connie didn't need to think for even a full second before she began to recite: "As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a distance, hallooing. 'Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!' He looked around, but could see nothing but a crow winging its solitary flight across the mountain." Then she paused, raising her eyebrows in a silent question, asking if she should proceed.

He nodded as he read along with her, then snapped the book shut to reveal an eager face. "Okay, what's the trick? Did you memorize a little bit from each of the books? Use subliminal hints to make me pick this one?"

"Connie," her mother called, commanding the room's attention with her no-nonsense tone. She had one of her old textbooks opened and was looking down to a page Connie couldn't see. "Chapter Nine-Point-Three," she said, pointedly omitting the page number.

So Connie supplied it. "Page two-seventy," she said, and then recited: "Humans have a large surface area over which to exchange gases with their environment. The respiratory system actively moves air in and out, or  _ventilates_ , the lungs and then exchanges gases with cells in the blood."

Her mother's eyes grew wider as Connie read. Before Connie could go on, her mother slammed the book shut and stared. Her confusion broke the smile in her husband's face. "Connie, what's going on?" she demanded.

Connie tried to smile and look at ease, even though she felt more nervous than she ever had presenting a report at school. "Something happened today. Something woke up," she said, and touched the gemstone at her collar.

A moment of stunned silence followed the admission. Then, in a small voice, her father asked, "Is Jade back?"

She had been expecting the question. Even still, it landed like a punch to the stomach. "No," Connie murmured, shaking her head. "But I think her powers are. Back, I mean. In me."

Her mother put the textbook back on the shelf. Hand lingering, she touched at the wood. Connie could tell her mother had noticed the dust disturbed in front of each book from when they had been pulled earlier. "This happened today?" her mother asked, and the real question behind it was obvious.

"I promise," Connie insisted, lifting her hands. "Jade was an Archivist in space. It was her job to remember everything. So now I guess I can too. Or at least everything I read. And I can read super-fast. It's actually pretty cool. I mean, I did all my summer homework in a few minutes."

Already Connie could see the wheels turning in her mother's head. There was concern and uncertainty, of course. But Connie knew there was a tiny spark of calculation behind those feelings. Her mother was seeing grade point averages and college applications. Maybe even early acceptances. Prestigious institutions vying for Connie through scholarships and more.

 _You sold the razzle,_ Connie told herself, and allowed for a tiny smile.  _Now sell the dazzle._

Connie retrieved her next prop from under the coffee table, hefting it a few inches over the floor with her whole body. It was a large dumbbell, rusted at its edges and stamped with a prominent number at each end.

Her father stood up for a better look. "Hey, is that one of my old free weights? You know, your old man was pretty buff back in college. I've been meaning to get back into it," he said, and flexed a bicep. "Just gotta find a good time to start."

Folding her arms, her mother quipped, "Yes, it's been a hectic couple of decades."

Connie drowned out their banter and stared down at the dumbbell. She hadn't gotten to practice this part as much as she would have liked. Thinking muscular thoughts, Connie reached down, grasped the dumbbell in one hand, and hoisted it over her head.

The two adults went silent immediately.

The reaction made Connie grin, and she felt her body surge with whatever power let her lift the weight. It was heavier than her sword, and much more cumbersome, but she hefted it without any real effort.

"See?" she said, and held the weight straight out in front of her, and her arm remained utterly motionless. "I can't exactly stop a runaway train, but I'm way stronger now than I was. Sometimes." She swung the weight straight up again and began twisting its ends from side to side above her head. "I kinda found out when I sort of, a little bit, broke my bedroom door—"

Her mother's eyes, already saucer-wide, went bigger still as Connie released two of her fingers from the weight's grip. "Connie, you put that down this instant before you hurt yourself!" the woman snapped.

The commanding tone startled Connie. Suddenly all of the weight rushed back into Connie's arm, which couldn't handle it by half. She yelped and ducked out from under the plummeting dumbbell. Its end clipped the corner of the coffee table on the way to the floor, and a large divot crumbled out of the wood, leaving splintery edges and a dusting of shards on the floor.

Horrified, Connie stared at the crushed tip of the table. Her worst fears about her meeting, or presentation, or whatever she was trying to do stared back at her with ugly splinters. This was the scratched grandfather clock times a million. Now they would never listen to her.

"The Moron's Guide to Home Repair," Connie mumbled to herself, kneeling down to touch at the splinters. "Maintenance is key but for those times when preparation and lacquer won't do, you have to get your hands on some tools. See Table Six-One for essential must-have tools for your home." The page in her mind loomed large, and she wondered if maybe, perhaps, if only she could fix this, that her parents might still listen to her.

"Connie?" her father said.

"Lacquer," Connie continued, and suddenly she was living in a Ficklepedia page. "The term lacquer is used for a number of hard and potentially shiny finishes applied to materials such as wood." Then she tried to shake the page away. She didn't need to know about lacquer, she just needed the right kind from the store.

"Connie," her mother said, sounding upset. Or so Connie thought. It was hard to hear either of her parents for some reason. Was something wrong with her ears?

"The ability to feel an object, hear sounds," said Connie, at once buried in her mother's textbook again, "and maintain balance results from the stimulation of sensory receptors, called mechanoreceptors, located in skin and ears."

Maybe she could buy a new table? And a new doorknob. How much would that cost? She could read a flyer for a local hardware store, and then she would always know, forever. And her parents wouldn't be mad at her anymore, and she could tell them her plan, and they would listen.

"Connie!" Her parents' voices together barely reached her. They sounded afraid. And looking up from the table, Connie could see why.

The living room shook in a tempest. Fierce winds circled around them, tearing at the pictures on the walls and rattling the furniture. The books on the table flipped open and rifled their pages in a cacophony of rattling paper. Her mother and father stood together, squinting against the wind, their hair twisting and clothes fluttering and snapping. Even in the relative calm of the tempest's eye, Connie could feel her hair tug at her, trying to draw her into the storm's current.

Clutching at her temples, Connie tried to will the tempest silent with her mind. "No, no, no!" she cried.

"Connie," her mother shouted above the roar, her stern voice thready with panic. "We're not mad, but we are concerned. We need you to stop all of this right now!"

"I'm trying!" Connie protested. She even scooped at the wind with her hands, as if that would do anything. For all she knew, it would. But it didn't. "I'm sorry!"

Her mother put on her  _hospital face_ , the expression Connie knew could send the toughest nurses scurrying for cover. "Connie you stop the wind this instant!" But the expression cracked, and Connie could see her mother's gambit for what it was. She felt as lost and scared as Connie did.

Then her father wrapped his arms around her mother, bracing them both against the wind, and shouted, "Connie, I've had  **gust**  about enough of this wind nonsense!"

Connie blinked. Squinting through the storm and noise, she traded looks of confusion with her mother.

Furrowing his brow, her father raised his voice even higher. "Young lady, if you're trying to make a point, you're really  **blowing**  it right now!"

She had to be hearing things. The house was about to fall down around them, and he was cracking jokes? Connie wondered if she, or her father, or both of them had gone crazy.

"Did you think we would like all of this wind? Well, we're not  **big fans**!" he hollered above the tempest.

Connie couldn't help it. Despite her fear, and the anger she felt at herself, she started giggling.

In seconds, the wind began to die down. The books, the furniture, and the rattling pictures all settled, and her parents' blown-out hair laid sideways as the air finally calmed around them. Connie felt her own long hair easing back over her shoulders, five times its normal volume but blissfully still.

Her giggling petered out, and Connie leaned against the coffee table, her palm pressing absently at the broken corner. She didn't think the sight of it would set her off again, but she didn't want to take any chances.

Sagging, her father collapsed back into the couch, dragging her mother to his side. He looked relieved, but his face was drawn, and his hand was laced into his wife's, clenched to quell their shaking. "Nothing," he said, "stops a room dead quite like a Dad Joke."

"I am very glad I married you for your looks," her mother intoned tiredly. But she kissed the back of his hand, then dropped their clasped hands back to the couch. Looking to Connie, she said in a cautious tone, "Are you alright?"

Connie shook her head. "I'm sorry," she said in a tiny voice. "I didn't mean to do that."

Her mother and father exchanged a wordless look. Then they slid apart and each held out a hand. Relief flooded through Connie as she practically hurdled the coffee table to sit between them on the couch. The feeling of both of them squished around her on the small couch was already easing the churning sensation in her empty stomach.

"We know you didn't," her mother assured her, and stroked at Connie's windblown hair. "But this is…an issue. I think we need to… We need to…"

A helpless silence tumbled after her faltering words. It seemed to last forever, until her father broke it for a humorless chuckle. "Let's be honest," he said. "We don't know what we need to do. There aren't any books on what to do when your child starts making tornados." He glanced down, only half-kidding as he asked Connie, "There aren't any books on that, right?"

She shook her head. "I checked," she told him.

Her mother sighed and wrapped a possessive arm around Connie, drawing her even closer. "I never liked that table anyway," she said. "The important thing is that we keep everyone safe until we figure this out."

Connie felt a flicker of hope returning. Her careful planning had blown up in her face, but maybe that had worked to her advantage. "Actually," she admitted, "Steven and I have been talking, and we had some thoughts about that…"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, my big ambitions to publish a new chapter every week didn't last very long, did they? But I'm still going to try my best. 
> 
> Also, since everyone can see where the story is going, it's important that I point out that somebody beat me to it. I had always intended to take things in this direction, but credit where it's due: [Alexis_universe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexis_universe/pseuds/Alexis_universe) beat me to it a long time ago with a spinoff story, [Hybrid Gems, the Biggest Threats to Homeworld](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10398963/chapters/22963041). Give it a read, and check out their other works!
> 
> Additionally, the good folks at [ConnieSwap](https://archiveofourown.org/series/630527) let me write another Omake for them. Go check out [My Own Worst Enemy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10673391/chapters/37793498), the story of Lapis and Connie dealing with (and causing) a lot of mayhem in Beach City when the other Crystal Gems are away. And if you haven't already, go read ConnieSwap!


	3. Burrito Machine

Morning sunlight gleamed in the smooth, clear waters. The weather was warm, but a cool breeze blew in from the ocean to soften the first bite of summer's heat. Part of Connie was overjoyed to be back in Beach City to enjoy the perfect day at the shore. But another part, a larger part, dragged a sense of dread behind her like an anchor in the sand. That her parents were walking behind her made the feeling even more tangible.

As they crossed the beach together toward the house beneath the temple, she could feel her parents staring over her head at the imposing figure jutting out of the cliff face. "Do they actually wash their clothes up there?" her mother asked.

Connie glanced up at the washer and dryer perched high above on one of the temple's hands. Anxiety coiled around her empty stomach, but she kept it out of her voice as she answered, "Oh, sure. But I think Pearl does all the laundry, and there's a warp pad up there anyway, so it's totally safe. Nobody needs to jump up and down from there." Any of the Gems certainly could make the jump if they wanted to, and likely did so all the time, but Connie made sure to leave that part unmentioned.

"Mmn," her mother grunted, still staring up at the shirts and pants fluttering on the drying line high above them. She did not sound assuaged.

Knuckles aching, Connie clenched her fists at her side. The point of their visit was to prove to her parents that the beach house could be, would be, a safe place for Connie to figure out this new whatever-it-was with Jade's gemstone. If they were hesitant to send her to a regimented, heavily regulated place like space camp, they would definitely think twice—thrice!—about letting Connie stay with the Gems. She had to keep her nervousness in check.

That check became harder still to keep when they climbed the steps of the porch to find a colorful banner hung above the door, greeting them with the words, _WELCOME NEW CAMPERS!_

Scratching his chin, her father stared up at the banner and said, "So, when you said this could be 'like a summer camp,' what exactly did you mean?"

Connie couldn't answer, having no idea herself. A murmuring of soft voices drifted through the screen door, but stopped at the sound of footsteps on the porch. The door opened, and Steven stepped out to greet them. He wore a pink baseball cap marked with a yellow star to match his shirt, and a silver athletics whistle hung from a nylon cord around his neck. A wooden clipboard was tucked under his arm as he extended his free hand to greet Connie's family, shaking each of their hands.

If he was put off by the bewildered looks Connie and her parents were all giving him as they reflexively returned the handshake, his salesman's smile didn't show it. "Welcome! You must be the…" He checked his clipboard, flipping through several blank pages. "—Maheswaran family! And you're the first to arrive! Very punctual. We'll just wait until everyone checks in, and then we can start the tour."

They stared back at him in a moment of confused silence.

Steven checked his clipboard again, and then announced, "Well, it looks like that's everyone. Please follow me, and we'll get started!"

Connie forced a giant smile onto her face as she motioned for her dumbstruck parents to follow Steven, trying to pretend as though she had any idea of what was happening. But even that fantasy shattered as she stepped through the door and entered some bizarre alternative of the house she had been expecting.

The walls and furniture were obscured behind a forest of cardboard cutouts, each one hewn and hastily spray-painted to look like crude, zigzagged pine trees. A tight circle of stones sat in the middle of the floor, with more cardboard wedged inside the circle and painted to resemble a roaring campfire of logs and sticks. Cartoonish cardboard wildlife frolicked motionlessly in the corrugated forest, including a bear wearing a park ranger's hat and a racoon that appeared to be wearing some kind of jet pack.

Peridot stood at the campfire, holding a set of metal tongs with a raw s'more pinched in the tines over cardboard flames. Her triangle of bushy hair had been stuffed into a pink ball cap identical to Steven's, and she wore a matching whistle around her neck. Behind her, Greg Universe lounged on the couch, a half-tuned guitar spitting out notes as he tested its pegs. Pearl sat beside him with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her face a tight grimace that was probably meant to be a smile. And above them in the loft, Amethyst lay upside-down on Steven's bed, a video game _beeping_ and _booping_ on the TV screen while the controller clacked in her hands.

When she saw the new arrivals, Peridot flung the tongs and their contents aside and opened her arms in a broad gesture. "Ah, welcome, Connie Jade and caregivers! You have the honor of being the first visitors to Camp Crystal Gem!"

 _Camp Crystal Gem_? Connie mouthed the name silently at Steven, making her face a question. Steven just smiled and offered her a thumbs-up in reply, which answered nothing, but made her feel the tiniest bit better.

Pearl rose from the couch and began, "When Steven told us about Connie's problems with her g—"

Peridot sidestepped, upstaging Pearl. "The camp is a multi-disciplinary immersive environment for burgeoning human-gem hybrids, designed almost exclusively by me, Peridot. I'm the head camp counselor, a firm-but-fair authority figure who balances whimsy with responsibility, and just wants to see the campers have the same kind of experience she had when she was a larva like them."

"You were never a kid," Amethyst grunted from the loft.

Ignoring the comment, Peridot wrapped an arm around Steven, presenting him to the Maheswarans. "Steven is our co-counselor, and the son of the camp's owner. His too-cool attitude and feigned indifference masks a deep uncertainty about his taking over the family business one day."

Steven's smile cracked and widened. "I'm so conflicted?" he said.

Pearl tried to chime in, but Peridot interrupted her again with the full sum of her body and voice. "And Pearl is the camp cook. She doesn't get any storylines."

Mouth tightening, Pearl said, "Why don't I get you some refreshments?" She spun on her heel and marched into the kitchen, gathering plates and dishes in the huffiest manner she could.

"I'm not sure I understand," Connie's mother drawled as she stared at the cardboard forest surrounding them. "We just thought Connie would be staying with you for a little while. This is…more?"

Connie braced her smile with a deep breath, and then turned to her parents, gesturing to the madness around them. "Oh, I get it!" she said loudly. "The Gems put all this together as a big metaphor for the kind of environment they want to create for me while I stay with them! It's not literally a summer camp, but it's just as safe and reliable as if it actually were. Right?" She hurled the last word at Steven with an unspoken plea beneath it, beaming panic at him with a look she hoped her parents wouldn't see.

Steven mercifully received her message, and started to agree with her. But Peridot upstaged him as well with the speed and certainty of a used car salesperson. "What? No, that's ridiculous. This is one hundred percent a real summer camp, right down to its rustic yet exquisite facility tailor-made for demi-human survival. We have walls, a ceiling, a door that actually closes, running water available in a wide range of temperatures, and active electricity available from nearly any wall! But don't take my word for it. Take it from the camp's founder!"

She clambered over the coffee table and hopped onto the couch to drag Greg into the conversation. The old musician grinned uncomfortably as he waved and said, "Uh, hey! Actually, we're really excited about Connie coming to stay here. And I got a bunch of stuff to make her feel welcome."

Greg reached under the coffee table and drew out a bundle of thick metal rods mashed into some olive-colored canvas. Then he spread the rods and planted their rubber ends on the floor, snapping the canvas taut into a long rectangle.

"Voila!" said Greg. "Presenting the _All Cot Up_ , the pinnacle of mobile sleeping technology. I picked it up years ago at a military surplus store. Four out of five drill sergeants rated it 'too good for those worthless maggots!'"

Forgetting her worry for a moment, Connie ran her hands across the edge of the cot. The canvas felt rough, and its thick seams pinched at her skin. It wobbled at her touch, its rods creaking. This contraption seemed to be a different species entirely from her big, comfy bed back at home, and that made it feel exactly right for the summer Connie had imagined. "It's perfect!" she declared, beaming up at Greg.

His face lit up, and he retrieved a big metal box next, setting it onto the tabletop with a heavy thunk. "And it comes with a matching footlocker. Father Time took care of most of the leftover boot odor, but I'm sure an air freshener will cover up the rest."

As Connie marveled at the adventurer's comforts Greg had gotten her, she heard a note of alarm enter her father's voice behind her. "So both of the kids would sleep in the same room? Together?" he said.

"Well…there's really only the one room," Greg said, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Not accurate," Peridot noted. "And I can vouch for the long-term viability of the bathroom as a private cell. That's where they held me prisoner, and I adapted just fine!"

Greg quickly knelt to put his arm around Steven, tapping the boy's hat bill up to better see his abashed features. "We taught Schtu-ball here from an early age about being a good roommate, seeing as how he had three of them right away. Oh, and he and I just had part two of the 'Birds and Bees' talk to cover anything we missed the first time around. So there are no surprises."

Steven blushed furiously, and he yanked the hat bill back down over his face. Connie might have thought it cute if her own face wasn't blazing with embarrassment.

"How old are you again, Steven?" her father asked.

"Fourteen," Steven squeaked from underneath the hat.

As Connie watched, her father went from being shocked, to scandalized, to slightly impressed, and then to deeply suspicious, all within the span of one second. Thankfully, her mother already seemed beyond the horrors of a perpetual boy-girl sleepover and into broader concerns as she gingerly swiped the interior of the footlocker. Her finger came out of the box with a thick cake of rust at the tip. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of room for Connie or her things," her mother said, a world of unspoken criticism bulging behind the veneer of her civil tone.

"Sure there is!" Connie insisted. "A-And I don't need that much—"

Peridot again thrust herself to the forefront. "Not to worry. We have an adaptive piece of camp equipment that can serve any need imaginable." Then she stamped her foot and bellowed, "Amethyst!"

The stocky Quartz moaned and let her game controller drop to the bed. Her groan persisted as she flumped off the mattress, then off the edge of the loft, landing heavily on the couch. "Don't call me 'equipment,'" she groused.

"Hey, do you want me to build you that burrito machine or not? You promised to help. Now be storage for Connie Jade!" commanded Peridot.

"Burrito machine?" Connie's father said.

With another groan, Amethyst dissolved her body into white light and poured it onto the coffee table, where it solidified and dimmed into the shape of a second footlocker. Her gemstone sat where the lock should have been, and her eyes were unnervingly far apart at either end of the locker's face. The lid clacked as she spoke, revealing big teeth and a wide pink tongue inside. "Put stuff inside me, yo! I promise I won't eat it. Probably."

Even Connie, well inured to Amethyst's varying shapes, was discomfited by this transformation. So she really couldn't blame her parents for backing sharply away from the table and its talking locker. "Amethyst, you don't really have to—" began Connie.

"Connie Jade is right!" Peridot insisted. "Where's the imagination? Where's the grandeur worthy of Camp Crystal Gem? You can do better!"

The wide eyes of the purple footlocker rolled, and then vanished into another white glow. After pouring herself onto the floor, Amethyst stretched upward into a looming six-foot tower, her roundness hardening into sharp corners. New details bulged forth in the shape of curling scrollwork, patterns of white and deep lavender arising to frame a pair of tall rectangular doors. As the last of the light faded, Amethyst solidified into a large, ornate freestanding armoire. The Gem's face sat above the doors as part of an elaborate carving. "Tada!" she sang.

"…I mean," Connie drawled, smiling back at her befuddled parents, "that's better, right?"

"And check it!" Amethyst said. Her eyes grew hooded, her smile vanishing. "Behind my doors lies a magical gateway to a strange, mysterious world where talking animals fight against a tyrannical witch!"

Connie bit her lip, not sure whether to laugh or cry as she watched her parents eyes grow huge. Anxiety wrung her empty stomach like a sponge.

Then Amethyst laughed. "Nah, I'm kidding, you guys! It's just Pearl."

The armoire doors swung outward, revealing a view of the kitchen through the backless, empty Gem-furniture. Pearl stepped gingerly through the armoire with platters of food balanced in her hands. "I made Turkish Delights!" the pale Gem announced.

A tiny breath jetted through Connie's nose as she sagged in relief, watching her parents approach the _hors d'oeuvres_ carefully. She could always count on Pearl's impeccable instincts for hospitality. The Gem was already talking about how seriously she took Steven's food, and how they made sure he ate every day. Comparatively, the tales of Steven's frozen dinner diet was a ray of sunshine into the gloom, even if it did made the color drain out of Connie's mother's face.

Steven sidled up next to Connie as her parents gave the tray of snacks a tepid response. "Hey," he whispered. "How do you think it's going?"

Her empty stomach stress-gargled one reply, while her mouth answered, "Not exactly how I thought it would."

"Sorry," he whispered. "I was talking to the guys about having you here, and I let it slip that it would be kind of like a Gem summer camp. As soon as Peridot heard that, she started offering suggestions, and then it all kind of just…happened."

"It's okay," Connie whispered back. "I'm really glad they like the idea at all." Her stomach growled again, and she clutched at her middle, frowning.

Steven's frown deepened as he watched her. Then he darted a few steps and hopped into the air, floating behind Pearl. He scooped an array of _hors d'oeuvres_ into a bowl he made out of his shirt front, then dropped down and scampered back to Connie. "Well, everything is better with food. And Pearl really went all-out with this stuff. Here!"

She was about to object when Steven tossed a Turkish Delight at her in a high arc. Her warrior instincts took over, and she ducked under the flying delight to catch it on her tongue. A sweet bouquet filled her mouth as she chewed, and she grinned. "Wow!" she said around the mouthful.

"Right?" Steven said, popping a delight in his own mouth. "Here, go long for a cake ball!"

Connie jogged a couple of steps backward and snatched the treat out of the air with her teeth. Giggles bubbled up in her chest as she swallowed and then opened her mouth for Steven to make another toss. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of her father staring at them both from the edge of the conversation with Pearl. He seemed shocked at the sight of the teens and their game.

On reflex, Connie drew her hands together in front of her and stood perfectly straight, ignoring the treat that went sailing over her head. "We'd better not right now," she whispered to Steven, and tried to watch her father's reaction from her periphery.

Her father looked like he was about to say something to her, his brow wrinkling with concern. Or maybe disappointment? But then her mother elbowed him gently, drawing him back into her conversation with Pearl. "Both of us," her mother said, loudly suggesting that her husband pay attention again, "are very grateful that you're willing to open your home to Connie. We're just not sure this is the most conducive place for her to spend her summer. It's more important than ever that she have a chance to start building her college applications, networking with potential contacts that can support her, and creating a foundation of extracurriculars that will help her future path."

"Sword-training does help my future path," Connie snapped without thinking. The heat in her own voice surprised her, and certainly surprised her mother, whose brow furrowed at the tone.

Pearl's mouth flapped in wordlessness, unable to break the argument gathering between Connie's and her mother's scowls. Connie herself wasn't sure what else she could say that she hadn't already said a dozen times to her mother. So she was almost grateful when Peridot interrupted them again. Almost.

"Camp romance!" the engineer blurted.

The non-sequitur proved powerful enough to break the spell, and rescued Connie from having to repeat the same old fight she had inadvertently renewed.

Once again the center of attention, Peridot composed herself, and said, "Naturally, an essential component of the camp experience is the camp romance. No season is complete without it! And whereas other camps need to rely on multiple incomplete romantic options: the jock, the genius, the best friend with the longstanding unspoken crush—"

Standing behind Peridot, Steven tried to stuff himself up into his hat.

"—but Camp Crystal Gem has its own dedicated apex romancer!" Peridot announced.

Pearl raised an eyebrow. "We do?"

"Amethyst!" bellowed Peridot.

The purple armoire sighed, then blurred into white light and condensed herself into a thick, masculine shape. When the light faded, Amethyst became a long-haired hunk wearing tattered jeans and flipflops. The sleeves of her star-branded T-shirt were torn away, revealing thick, strong arms. Her round face featured a familiar, now cleanshaven smile as Amethyst posed and flexed in her new body. "Whassup?" she purred, winking.

Connie recognized the figure from the old album covers and Polaroid pictures Steven had shown her of his dad's rock star past. Amethyst had become a perfect purple copy of a young Mister Universe, complete with long, flowing hair.

"…what a great point, Amethyst," Steven said, breaking the thunderous stunned silence of the room. "Camp Crystal Gem is the best at everything, which includes making things super-awkward. Heh…" He looked to his father for help, but Greg was oblivious, staring down as he cradled his gut forlornly.

The hairs on Connie's neck tingled, and she thought she felt the stirrings of air around her. Another windy meltdown would almost be welcome at this point, if it didn't mean endangering an entire room filled with the people she cared about the most, and Peridot. Before the air could pick up any speed from her despair, though, a voice from outside called to them, "I'm back."

"Thank the stars," Pearl muttered. Then, hastily cutting a smile across her mouth, she announced, "That must be Garnet! Let's everyone forget whatever Amethyst is doing and go see what she has, right now!"

"Please, yes!" Connie hiccupped before Pearl had finished speaking. Their tour group shambled out the front door at Pearl's urging. Amethyst, reading the room—or perhaps Connie's silent screams—changed back into her usual shape along the way.

As her eyes adjusted to sunlight again, Connie found Garnet walking out of the surf. Rivulets of water drizzled out of the fusion's shoulder pads, and her afro sagged wetly as she strode onto dry sand. A rectangular box made of half-rotted planks sat perched on one of her shoulders, kept in balance by a light, bejeweled touch.

With her free hand, Garnet slid a triangular diving mask up from her face, revealing her angular visor underneath as she greeted Connie's parents with a nod. "Mission accomplished," she told Steven, who grinned.

"Steven explained how important it was for Connie to collect scholarships for college," Pearl explained. "And once he clarified that it meant money, and not vessels devoted to research, we knew we could help."

Sniffing, Peridot added, "Though I am prepared to take my Biblioboat schematics to the prototype phase if needed."

"I still like 'The Readership' better for a name," Steven said.

"It's my design, so I get to name it," Peridot hissed.

"So," Pearl said loudly, her rictus smile widening, "presenting the _Crystal Gem Scholarship Award For Excellence In Being Connie_. Steven came up with the title."

"I wasn't aware Rose Quartzes had special naming powers too," Peridot grumbled exactly loud enough to be heard.

With zero flourish, Garnet dropped the crate and ripped off its rotting top. The wood peeled away in a curl of dripping splinters to reveal a bed of glittering, glistening coins inside the box. Connie felt her heart jump as her eyes widened upon a veritable fortune in rough-hewn coins. Their minting had been faded by centuries of ocean living, but the contents couldn't be mistaken for anything else.

"You got me sunken pirate treasure?" Connie exclaimed, bouncing up and down excitedly. "Ohmygosh, thank you! You guys are the best!"

"Boom. Scholarship," Garnet said, and smiled. Then her expression sobered, and she added, "I don't know how much a college costs, so if that's not enough, I can go get more."

Greg feigned indignation, grinning all the while as he whined, "Hey, you guys never offered me a scholarship!"

"You never asked," Garnet retorted. "And you don't qualify for the _Crystal Gem Scholarship Award For Excellence In Being Connie_."

"Got me there," agreed Greg. "I probably would have spent it all on chili fries at the student union anyway."

Connie grinned up at her mother and father, ready to make a joke about how they could now spend her existing college fund on that rocket bike she had asked for when she was six years old. But her smile trickled flat when she saw the slackened, wide-eyed, bloodless expressions plastered over her parents' faces. They looked shell-shocked, staring with open mouths at the Gems' wonderful gift. Why weren't they excited? Why weren't they happy? Connie hadn't seen her parents look so lost since…

…since they had all faced down Flint and Milky Quartz in the Kindergarten.

Her parents' silent shock resonated through Connie like a flat note that she was just now hearing, one that undoubtedly had been blaring at her since they had set foot on the beach. Everything—the shapeshifting, the camp pageantry, and now a life-changing amount of money being handed to them—had broken her parents. It was too much at once, and Connie hadn't seen that until after she had helped shove them into the thick of it. Any hope that she might have had of convincing her parents that the beach house would be a calm, safe place for her to get Jade's gemstone under control had been shattered, if it had ever been real at all.

"Nonsense, Garnet," Peridot said imperiously. "Camp Crystal Gem isn't just an immersive environment. It's a submersive environment!" Then she snapped her fingers, and commanded, "Amethyst, become a submarine capable of deep-water exploration that Connie Jade can pilot. And survive in."

Amethyst blinked. "Uh, I can do a helicopter, and I can do a dolphin. Maybe I can mash them up somehow?"

Peridot heaved into her whistle, blasting Connie out of her misery with the shrill noise. "Unacceptable!" the little Gem howled. "If you want that burrito machine, you'd better turn into something that facilitates ocean exploration right now!"

The Quartz scowled. "Fine," she said. Then her scowl vanished into white light. An instant later, Amethyst's body had ballooned outward, transforming into a tremendous purple catapult. Her face had become the bucket, which scooped underneath Peridot's feet with its menacing grin. Then, unleashing a mighty _twang_ , the catapult flung Peridot out to sea. The engineer's scream dwindled, and then vanished into a faint _splish_ near the horizon.

Pearl massaged the bridge of her nose. "Amethyst…" she scolded.

"Oh, don't even start," the catapult groused, and turned back into Amethyst. "She was being a jerk. No burrito machine is worth that much hassle."

Connie wished she could smile at the Gems' banter, but all she could focus on was her parents' stunned faces. Their silence hadn't gone unnoticed, and even Amethyst and Pearl tabled their impending argument to give the two visitors space. As Connie watched them stare dumbly at the soggy crate, she wondered if there was anything left she could say or do that might salvage the day.

But Greg beat her to it, clapping his hands and rubbing them together briskly. "Okay," he announced, "I think that's lunch."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoof. Five months since the last chapter.
> 
> I won't spend much time talking about what happened, other than to say that everything I said about depression back in the notes for [this chapter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9500753/chapters/28825263#workskin) applies tenfold, probably more. I've felt lost in my own head for quite a while now, and I don't think I'm completely back yet, but I'm getting there. Thank you to everyone who commented and stuck with this story. You guys are the best.
> 
> On the plus side, I was gone so long that _Steven Universe_ went and got itself a proper Jade. Welcome to the family, Lemon Jade!
> 
>  


	4. Teenage Rebellion

Sprawled on the couch, Connie succumbed to the groan that had been building inside of her. The sound rattled every part of her body, from her heels hooked over the back of the couch to the ends of her hair brushing at the floor, and seemed to fill every inch of the beach house at once.

"You said it," Amethyst said from the patch of floor where she basked in a sunbeam.

Steven sat right-side up next to Connie on the couch, rubbing his arm. A guilty look dragged at his features. "I'm sorry if it didn't go so great," he said again.

It was the eighth time he had apologized since Greg had herded her shell-shocked parents toward the city for a sit-down lunch.  _Grown-ups only_ , the old rock star had told her, answering her worried look with a wink.  _We'll bring you two back something._  And then they'd all trudged up the beach together, leaving Connie behind to decide everything without her.

Pearl sighed as she lugged a stack of cardboard trees toward the door. "I'm sorry, Connie. I'm not sure I was very reassuring to your parents' concerns."

Poised at the door to take inventory of the cardboard Pearl was gathering, Peridot nodded in agreement. The motion threw beads of seawater from the soggy pink ball cap she still insisted on wearing. "I concur. Most of the failure is Pearl's fault," said Peridot, completely missing Pearl's glare. "But I can't help but feel some small responsibility nonetheless. My aspirations for the perfect summer camp overreached my current means to construct it on such short notice. But it's like they say: even Homeworld wasn't built in a day."

Connie pressed her lips together. It would be easy, and probably cathartic, to blame Peridot's enthusiasm for this disaster. But that wasn't the real problem. Nor was the problem Amethyst's shapeshifting, Pearl's snacks, or the life-changing amount of money Garnet had fished out of the ocean. The real problem was that her parents still refused to deal with this part of her life.

"They always do this to me!" The words burst out of Connie, exploding through the tight line of her mouth. She thumped her fists against the upholstery and snarled, "They always promise they'll listen, that I'll get to be part of the decision. Then they go off and do whatever they want on their own." She didn't want to, but she couldn't help looking to Steven and adding, "And now your dad is doing it too!"

"I'm sure my dad just…" Steven trailed off, looking down at his hands in his lap. Then he curled them into fists and thumped the couch as Connie had. "No, you're right. It's not fair! You should be part of the decision."

Kicking her legs, Connie rolled backwards off the couch, landing in a swirl of her own skirt. "I can't just sit back and let them decide this without me," she declared.

Steven leapt after her, pumping his arms. "Then let's do something about it!"

She grinned, feeling his enthusiasm spark her own back to life. "You have a plan?" she asked.

"Yeah." He rubbed at his chin, his brow furrowed. "They're gonna come back from their lunch not only fully nourished, but with lots of reasonable-sounding arguments, saying things like 'child endangerment' or 'twice the daily allotment of sodium.'"

"Boo!" jeered Amethyst.

"But if we know what their reasons will be, we can be prepared," Steven said.

Connie's eyes widened. "That's exactly what they do on my favorite cable family legal dramedy,  _Lawyer-In-Law_. It's called 'opposition research.' Steven, that's brilliant! We can spy on them and take apart their argument before they even make it! Let's do it!"

Whirling to the door, his fist raised in triumph, Steven declared, "Then the time has come to reassemble the Secret Team!"

"No." The word thudded out of Garnet, who leaned in the corner of the room with her arms folded over her chest. She'd been so quiet for so long that Connie had forgotten about her entirely, and jumped at the sound of her voice. "No secret teams."

"Oh." Steven lowered his fist. "Well, can we be regular spies?"

Garnet shrugged one shoulder. "It won't go how you think it will," she warned, her visor glinting.

Ominous portents aside, Connie knew it was still her best chance. "We have to try," she said.

"Anyone else want to help?" asked Steven. "Pearl? Amethyst?"

Pearl shook her head as she hefted a bundle of cardboard trees. There were still a great deal of corrugated forest remaining in the house for her to disassemble. "I need to clean up all of this," she said.

"Here, Pearl. Let me help." Peridot shouldered the thick stack of cardboard from Pearl's arms, and then lugged it to the circle of stones in the middle of the floor. With a heave, she tossed the cardboard trees into the circle, crushing the cardboard flames and logs inside of it. "Maybe one day," the little engineer murmured, holding her hands out to bask in its imaginary heat as her imaginary trees vanished into imaginary smoke.

Pearl blinked owlishly at the pantomime. "Um, Peridot?" she said.

"Do you mind?" Peridot snarled over her shoulder, tears brimming behind her visor. "I'm saying goodbye to my dream, you insensitive clod!"

"Yeah, I'm good here too," Amethyst said, her cheek pressed to the floor as she idly slid across the room. She happened upon a pair of broken crackers next to a marshmallow, some chocolate, and a set of tongs. "Oh, sweet! Floor S'mores!" Her tongue lashed out and drew the entire lot into her mouth. The tongs crunched loudly while she chewed.

"Keeping the team small will probably be stealthier anyway," Connie said. "Okay, Steven. It's your plan. Where do we start?"

"Dad will want to impress your parents, so he'll take them to the nicest restaurant in town," Steven mused aloud, his eyes narrowing in thought.

* * *

After nearly a minute of Steven's uninterrupted knocking, the door opened, and Jenny Pizza peered down at the two expectant spies. "Steven? And you're…Connie, right? Pineapple anchovies? What are you two doing back here?" the pretty teen asked, opening the back door of Fish Stew Pizza wider.

Steven stood with Connie, pressed close to the building to use the restaurant's dumpster as cover from all the prying eyes that they hadn't seen on their way to the restaurant. "Jenny, is my Dad in there?"

"Yeah, he sat down with some other couple and ordered already," said Jenny. Her gaze lingered on Connie, and realization sparked in her eyes.

"Great! We're here on super-serious business," Steven announced.

The Pizza twin cocked a fist on her hip. "C'mon, Steven. Your 'pizza inspector' gag was funny the first six times, but Daddy said we're not allowed to give you any more free slices."

Even the thought of food made Connie's stomach rattle. She shook her head and insisted, "We're not here for that, I promise. We need to spy on my parents and Mister Universe while they come up with reasons to keep me at home this summer because they're worried about me even though I'm worried about bringing the house down on top of them because I don't know what I'm doing!"

Jenny blinked and tilted her head. "Mm'kay, I missed most of that, but I'm getting a general vibe of teenage rebellion here. Yeah?" When Connie and Steven nodded emphatically, she stepped back and motioned for them to follow her. "Cool. Stay low and don't touch anything edible. We still got a health code rating to maintain."

Steven quickly wiped the grin off his face, looking stern as he turned to Connie and intoned, "We're in."

Crouching, Connie slunk after Steven, following Jenny through the too-tiny kitchen of the restaurant. Kiki was switching pies in the wall of pizza ovens, and gave them all a quizzical look, but said nothing when Jenny offered her a thumbs-up as explanation. Connie wondered if it was some kind of silent sibling communication, a  _twintuition_ , or if they had simply snuck any number of people into the kitchen before.

At Jenny's unspoken direction, Connie and Steven took up positions behind a shelf of dry goods that blocked them from view of the front of the restaurant. By standing on tiptoe and carefully, gingerly separating a pair of large cans of industrial-grade tomato paste, Connie was able to peer over the front counter, past the register, to the checkered tables of the dining area. A stray glance made her accidentally and permanently memorize the ingredients of that tomato paste, which gave her even less of an appetite than before.

Straining all of the nascent spycraft she had gleaned from television and movies, Connie was able to locate their targets, who happened to be seated at the one occupied table in the entire restaurant. Greg sat with his back to the kitchen, his expression a mystery but his voice loud and clear. "—the best pizza from here to Empire City!"

Filling out the rest of the table, Connie's parents were in clear view. Her mother sipped reluctantly at a glass of cloudy water as she raised an eyebrow at Greg. "Better than Original Famous Original Ray's?" she said, sounding unconvinced.

Greg lifted his hands and laughed. "Hey, I said 'to' Empire City, not 'in' Empire City. But you didn't hear that from me. The staff here can get pretty vindictive," he said loudly enough for the entire kitchen to hear him.

Jenny and Kiki offered perfunctory glares from the kitchen. Connie watched her parents offer equally perfunctory smiles, but she recognized the worry hidden behind the expressions. Already she could see the shape of the argument they would levy against her in the fight to come. It lit an anger inside of her, seeing them ready to conspire against her, but she tamped down on the flames. She had to remain objective, and dispassionate, and logical. Any signs of a tantrum would be grounds for them to disqualify anything she said.

Evidently Greg could see what Connie saw, because his posture eased back in his chair. He let the uncomfortable silence simmer as Jenny ran a steaming pizza out to the table. Once the twin had retreated back to the kitchen, the old rocker dished out slices for his guests first.

"You know," Greg said, dishing out his own slices last, "all that stuff you saw today, that's not even close to what it's normally like. The Gems just have a natural flair for putting on a show. I think they got a little too excited, that's all."

"They definitely seem excitable." Connie watched her father collect a fork and knife for his pizza, and she cringed in secret as he began to cut a slice into bite sizes.

Her mother, at least, had the decency to eat the pizza with her hands. "I have to warn you, Greg," she said, poised at her slice's tip, "if you're looking to wine and dine us, I have some experience with that tactic. Pharma companies try it all the time. Granted, they never thought to try pizza." She took a bite, and after a few thoughtful chews, she nodded in satisfaction.

Greg chuckled, and pulled at his slice, drawing a long string of mozzarella back to his plate. "I was never much of a salesman anyway. You can ask the boxes and boxes of Mister Universe merch I still have if you don't believe me." His head tilted, and an apologetic note entered his voice as he added, "And to be honest, I don't really need to make any sales pitch here. Connie needs help, and the Gems are the one to give it to her."

The stunned silence from Connie's parents boomed, swallowing the ambient noise of the restaurant.

Lifting his hands, Greg said quickly, "Hey, sorry. That sounded way less harsh in my head. Like I said, I'm bad at this. But…the fact is, Connie has a Gem inside of her, and there's only one bunch I know to go to for something like that."

Connie's father set his knife and fork aside. His face hardened in a way Connie had rarely seen. "When you put it like that, it sounds pretty grim," he admitted.

"It's not like that at all!" Greg said quickly. "The Gems think the world of Connie. We all do! And we want to do whatever we can to help her get a handle on her new situation."

A heavy look passed between Connie's parents. Then, in a quiet voice, her mother said, "We haven't completely given up hope that the gemstone can be removed. And now, with Jade…gone…"

Connie felt her eyes burn. Looking down, she found her hand at her chest, her fingers curled around the square stone under her dress. Steven gave her a look of concern, but she tightened her mouth and shook her head.

"Well, the Gems might be able to help with that too. Whatever you decide, we'll all be there to help you and Connie through this. And even if you don't think Connie should stay here, that's okay. Look how far she's come just from visiting on weekends. Pearl says she's a natural with that sword!"

The shelf in front of Connie began to tremble. As her palms began to ache, she realized that she was clutching the metal shelving, her skin blanching at the hard, sharp edges. She was more than furious, barely able to keep herself from leaping across the counter and exploding at the table of grown-ups. Her parents were acting exactly as she feared, exactly as they had promised they wouldn't: they were making decisions for her, without her. And now Greg was chiming in with the same tune. She could feel her grip on herself slipping as her whole body coiled to act.

"But…" Greg continued.

Connie's breath caught in her throat, and she froze.

Twisting a napkin in his hands, Greg looked down and said, "Gem stuff is messy. Like, 'rebuilding your house' messy, even when there isn't something stirring up trouble. Which, from what Steven tells me, there is. That's why the Gems live so far away from everyone else. Well, one of the reasons."

Her father tapped his fork against his plate nervously, eyes distant with memory. "We already had a bit of an incident," he admitted.

 _Windcident,_  Connie corrected him in silence.

"Those will happen," Greg agreed, nodding. "They should happen. It means she's figuring it all out. But that's gonna happen again, and if Steven's any indication, it could take a long time before Connie has a good handle on what she can do. Being somewhere where she doesn't have to be afraid of hurting anyone or anything can help a lot with that."

"Connie would never…" her mother started to snap, but then bit down on her words. Deep creases lined her forehead as her gaze fell, her eyes flickering in thought.

"To be honest, though, it's not safety or elbow room that I'm thinking about. And I'm sorry if I'm stepping over the line for saying so, but…" Greg paused, and sighed. "I think kids need space to figure out the big stuff. I needed it for my music. Steven needed it for his Gem stuff. Maybe Connie needs that too. Because nobody else can figure this out for her. Not the Gems. Not us. Not Steven, either, and he's been there. Or at least some version of 'there.' That's why I think some time away could be really good for her."

It was a long, silent moment before her father said, "I think so too."

Her mother's eyes snapped back into focus, widening in horror at his words. Panic threaded her tone as she said, "Doug, no! You cannot make me the bad guy this time. Not for this."

Connie rocked backwards in shock, and watched her father doing the same. "Priyanka!" he started.

But her mother shook her head, cutting him off. Panic consumed any remaining authority in her tone. "You know how much this means to her. After the attack, after Jade… I can't be the bad guy! It isn't fair, Doug!" Her palms slapped the tabletop, making the plates jump.

Her father cupped his hand over her mother's. "Hey," he said quietly, and squeezed. "Hey, that isn't going to happen. We're together on this: if both of us don't agree, then it doesn't happen, and we both tell her."

None of the tension left her mother's body, but her eyes lost some of their wild, white panic.

Squeezing again, he continued, "Priyanka, she was eating back there. She was laughing."

"I…didn't notice that," her mother said in a small voice. "But Connie is going to need structure, and direction, and…"

"Love of my life," her father murmured, using a featherlight voice Connie had only ever heard from him a handful of times, "you are the smartest person I have ever met. But our daughter summoned a tornado in our living room. We have no idea what she needs right now."

Her mother's mouth hardened into a thin line.

"Maybe that stone in her falls off tomorrow. Maybe she becomes a wind goddess who conquers the world with storm and sword. Maybe she becomes a doctor who runs a lucrative kite rental business on the weekend." Her father smiled gently, leaning closer to his wife. "Right now, Connie misses Jade, and she's hurting. So maybe she just needs some time away on a beach to have fun with her best friend." His smile straining, he added, "Even if that best friend has a worrying lack of spare bedrooms available for her."

A snorting laugh cracked her mother's façade. She looked away, pretending to be annoyed so she could hide her smile, like she always did. The familiar tic turned her face toward where Connie was hidden, and Connie went completely still. Tears glistened in her mother's eyes, refusing to fall, but real all the same.

"You're right," her mother said, pretending to massage her eyelids so she could dry them in secret. "Of course you're right. I just… I thought we would have more time before all of 'this' became her life. I didn't think… I didn't think she'd be gone so soon."

Greg, who had been trying to somehow eat pizza and not exist near the conversation, gave up on doing both, and set his plate aside. "I don't know if this will help—probably the opposite—but it's okay to not be okay with it." His rough red knuckles worried against the tablecloth as his head tilted down. "Steven needed the Gems too. He needed that space and closeness with them. But letting him go to live with them is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's still hard some days, even with him just down the street. And knowing it was right doesn't stop me from missing the way it used to be."

A sniffle beside her made Connie glance at Steven. His hand covered his mouth, and tears streamed from his eyes.

"And hey," Greg continued, brightening, "none of this is set in stone. It's just for the summer, and if you don't think it's working out…"

Her mother nodded. "Thank you, Greg. That actually does make me feel better."

But she didn't look like she felt better to Connie. She looked like she was on the verge of tears, and clung to her husband's hand lest the edge overtake her. Connie stared through the canned marinara at her mother's glistening eyes. Her chest tightened as she tried to reconcile what she was seeing of the most unyielding, most stubborn person she had ever known looking frightened at the idea of Connie leaving. How could her mother be afraid of Connie's disappointment? Of being the  _bad guy_? Mothers were supposed to say  _no_  to everything. Mothers reveled in the power to say  _no_! At least, that's how it had always seemed to Connie.

Maybe saying  _no_  wasn't as fun as her mother had always made it look. But it didn't make her a bad guy. Her mother had to know that. Didn't she?

Stray hairs drifted across Connie's face. She smelled a melody of fresh pizza in the warm breeze, and saw Steven's curly nest of hair buffeting atop his head as he cried silent tears.

Kiki had to slap her hand onto a stack of napkins to keep them from sweeping away in the sudden draft. "Jenny!" she snapped, "You can't keep leaving the back door open!"

Jenny motioned to the back door, which was still closed, and then answered her sister with a rude gesture. Guiltily, Connie bit down on her lip and closed her eyes. She summoned a litany of her father's worst jokes from memory and concentrated on their terribleness until the wind died down again.

By the time Connie had subdued the breeze, Steven had dried his eyes, and their parents had settled the table, letting Jenny box most of the pizza for them to take. While Connie's parents left to wait outside, Greg took the box to the counter to settle the bill he had gently wrestled away from the Maheswarans. He'd only won the battle after promising to let them treat him after they'd found enough historical collectors and museums to help them convert Connie's scholarship booty into a more modern currency.

Connie and Steven both stood perfectly still in their hiding spots as Greg paid. "And the calzones?" Greg asked, laying a handful of bills on the counter.

Jenny added two cardboard packages on top of the pizza box as Kiki collected the cash. "One Supreme, and one pepperoni with mushrooms, hot and ready," the twin promised.

Greg grinned and added a pair of twenties to the counter separate from the bill. Neither teen was shy about taking the proffered tip. "You two saving for anything good?"

"College," Kiki answered.

"Guitar strings," Jenny answered.

He nodded to both. As the old rocker collected his food, Connie allowed herself the tiniest sigh in relief.

Then he stopped and added to the twins, "I'm going to take these two the long way around the block, give them time to decompress from all of that. Please tell the kids they can still beat us home, but they'll have to run if they don't want to get spotted."

Connie's sigh turned into a hiccup.

Jenny didn't miss a beat, blinking in confusion at him. "Sorry, who are you talking about?" she asked.

Greg grinned and winked. "Good for you. Don't trust anyone over thirty." Then, boxes in hand, he left to join the other parents. True to his word, he led them in the wrong direction across the window, taking the Maheswarans further down the boardwalk.

Connie stared through the shelf, watching them go. In a minute, she and Steven would need to leave through the back. They would sprint down the beach to avoid being seen, and would have to pretend to be delighted and surprised by the adults' decision, and she would force down a calzone with her favorite ingredients just to make sure her parents worried a little less about her.

But for now, for just one moment, Connie let her heart ache at the melancholy she saw through the window in her mother's features. Of all the reasons for her to say  _no_ , Connie never thought that the one reason to come closest to winning would be that her mother would miss her over the summer.

And now that she realized how much she would miss her parents as well, she nearly wished they had won. Not quite, but almost.


	5. Welcome Home!

"So…I guess that's everything," Connie heard her mother say.

Standing on the deck of the beach house, Connie stared down at her entire life distilled into a pair of duffel bags sitting between her parents' feet. Behind them, the family sedan sat parked on the beach, its rear axel scrunched low on its suspension thanks to the crate of old coins tucked in the trunk. Her mother's voice betrayed a surprise that Connie could feel tingling in her own stomach too.

The day before, with its faux camp and awful spy fiasco, somehow felt as though it had happened a lifetime ago. But the time since had flashed past them all at ludicrous speed. An awkward car ride home, and awkward final family dinner, an awkwardly tense family meeting in Connie's room to decide what she would need and wear for the rest of the summer, and a night of staring at the ceiling above her bed had all passed in the blink of an eye. Now it was morning again, and already time to say goodbye.

Connie shook away the dramatic notions and forced a smile for her parents. Steven and the Gems stood behind her, all hopefully smiling for real. "Yup!" Connie said, sounding casual even as the sound of her own heartbeat pounded in her ears.

"Are you sure you packed your—" Her mother started to bend toward the bags as if to open them and reinspect their contents for a fourth time. Connie saw her father stop the motion with a light touch to her mother's arm. Flustered, her mother straightened, grimacing at the color in her cheeks. "Right. Then we'll talk to you tonight?"

"Every night before bed," Connie said, reciting her promise. "Unless I'm on a mission where there aren't any cell towers. But I'll text you before and after every mission."

"Good," her mother said, clearly feeling anything but.

Her father rescued them from the uncomfortable silence. "Connie," he said sternly, "what are you going to be?"

Connie straightened, folding her hands in front of her. "I will be a good student who is mindful of her teachers but not afraid to ask questions," she said.

It was hard for her to keep a straight face. Her father seemed to have similar problems as his cheek twitched. "And what are you going to do?" he continued, still stern, but only just.

The twinkle in his eye broker her, and she grinned. "Kick a socially responsible amount of butt," she promised him.

His arms spread wide as he said, "Darn tootin'."

Connie leapt into his hug, burying her face in his shirt as she squeezed him as tightly as she could. The smell of his aftershave and his light sweat from the warm summer morning etched itself into her memory, wrapped tightly around the feeling of his strong arms lifting her up from the deck, and the tickle of his breath on her scalp, and the way his heartbeat raced against her ear pressed to his chest. Of all the memories Jade's gemstone could make permanent, she hoped that this could be one of them. "Love you, Dad," she murmured.

"Love you," he whispered into her hair. They both pretended that his voice was thick and rough from the force of her hug.

When Connie finally pulled away, she found her mother waiting half a step away, fidgeting. Those calm, clever, strong doctorly hands that had once orchestrated every detail of Connie's life now wrung themselves uncertainly, as though her mother had no idea of what to do with them. "If you…" her mother began, but stopped herself, closing her eyes in a sharp, silent curse. Then she started again, softer still, "I hope you…I mean, I want you to…"

Connie crashed into her mother, wrapping her in an embrace that made her arms ache. "I love you so much, Mom," she said fiercely.

A shudder ran through the fearsome woman, who held Connie tightly and pressed a kiss into the top of her head. "I love you," her mother croaked, sounding as though one more word would shatter her.

And with that, Connie knew she didn't need Jade's gemstone to immortalize the moment. No power could possibly make her forget the feeling, the scent, the warmth, of her mother's embrace. It would stay with her, always.

Wiping at his face, Connie's father looked to Amethyst, and said, "I gotta know: what on Earth is a burrito machine?"

Amethyst started to answer, but then stopped. Her brow furrowed and her bright eyes danced in thought for a moment, and then she said, "You know, I never asked. Peridot just offered it up to sweeten the deal, and I didn't even think about it. I just said yes."

Nodding, he said, "I probably would have too."

There were more awkward words, and worried looks, and long walks to a car that was parked at the bottom of the stairs. Then came the rumbling of an engine, the belch of exhaust, tires grinding against sand, straining under the weight of pirate booty. Through it all, Connie kept smiling and waving. She didn't stop until the last glimpse of that sedan as it disappeared around the far side of the cliff.

Connie thought her heart would ease once the long goodbye was finally over. Instead, it felt like the sanguine drumbeat inside of her would shake her apart. She didn't know what was wrong, or how she felt. Afraid? Excited?

Unmoored.

Her campaign to spend her summer at the beach house hadn't felt real even throughout all the packing the night before. The anticipation had been giddy, dreamlike. But the dream was reality now. And for the first time in her life, Connie's parents had left her somewhere with no immediate plan to come get her later. Connie's life was hers now, completely free. Terrifyingly free.

Before the sound of her own heartbeat could deafen her, and before the winds stirring around her could gather in earnest, she felt Steven slip his hand into hers. An instant later, Pearl's hand rested atop Connie's shoulder. The simple touches were enough to keep her from feeling as though she might float away.

Connie threaded her fingers with Steven's and squeezed. She rested her other hand atop Pearl's as she stared at the empty cliffside. She was untethered now, perhaps even moderately unsupervised, at least compared to life before. But she wasn't unmoored. She wasn't alone.

* * *

After a sufficient period of hand-holding and staring at the ocean to quell any panic attacks, Connie followed Steven into the house to settle into her new circumstances. A Quartz and a gentleman both, Steven had no problem hefting her bags for her. Pearl remained outside, intent on making one last sweep of the temple's exterior. She had been finding more cardboard animals left over from Peridot's camp, and wanted to make sure the corrugated species went extinct.

Connie might have walked into that house a hundred times before, but this time felt different.  _I live here now_ , she thought. Her eyes trialed across the kitchen and furniture that were all familiar, but still not hers.  _I live here now_ , her mind wailed in animal panic, the same way it used to when she had been a child entering some new house thousands of miles away from her old house after yet another cross-country relocation.

Then her eyes found the warp pad and the temple door at the back, mysterious and alien still, but also now hers in some small way.  _I live here now!_

Steven kicked his sandals off with expert marksmanship, slapping them against the far corner of the couch as he settled Connie's bags onto the coffee table. "Welcome home!" he sang, and shoved aside a basket of clean laundry on the couch so he could sit.

Hearing the word aloud triggered a world of reactions inside Connie. Her grin spread wider, and without realizing it she shucked her shoes and stowed them by the door, perfectly parallel. Then she skipped on bare feet to the coffee table to work at the zippers of her overstuffed luggage.

"It's probably too late to say this, but are you sure you won't get sick of me?" She meant for the question to sound teasing, but the silence that followed it gave her pause. "Steven?"

When she looked up at him, she found him staring toward the door, his brow crinkling. Then he caught her glance and smiled. "No way! This is going to be an amazing summer." He retrieved the old foot locker his dad had left her and heaved it to the tabletop.

Relieved, Connie began unloading her clothes bag into the locker. The rust caking it had been scrubbed away, probably by Pearl, and it was now pristine. "I think so too." Her hand paused to trace the square stone's edge through her shirt. "There's so much I have to learn about Jade's Gem…"

"And there's breakfasts at The Big Donut," Steven added, bending to collect his sandals, "and the sandcastle contest next month, and Beach-A-Palooza after that…" He wandered to the door and neatly arranged his sandals next to Connie's shoes, nudging them until they looked properly aligned.

Connie took the opportunity with Steven being across the room to scoop out her underwear from the bag in one overstuffed motion and cram it all under a stack of jeans. By the time he came back, all of her more embarrassing necessities were hidden away. "And we have to track down Pyrite, and Flint, and Milky, and figure out what Shard wants on Earth," she added.

He pulled over the basket of laundry he had shoved aside and began folding his clothes at the opposite end of the coffee table. Connie couldn't help but notice that he kept his own underwear hidden at the bottom of the basket, wadded up and almost out of sight. "Right. Garnet said they were looking for something. I'm guessing it'll be better if we find it first, whatever it is."

Her clothes stowed, Connie started on the second bag, removing her violin case, a few packets of folding paper, and the tight bundle of her training clothes she'd kept separate from the rest of her wardrobe. Last of all, she took out a stack of books, which she handled oh-so-carefully to keep herself from accidentally reading the covers as she stuffed them next to her underwear in the locker. Then she stood with her hands on the locker's edge, staring down at her life, formerly in bags, now in a box. "I'm not even sure where to start," Connie admitted to Steven.

The last of his shorts became a neatly folded rectangle, which he added to the stacked and organized basket of laundry. Brushing his hands clean, Steven shrugged and said, "Lunch?"

As Connie smiled and followed him into the kitchen, Pearl came through the front door, humming to herself in satisfaction. A soggy cardboard owl wearing a mortarboard and holding a cardboard lollipop was tucked under her arm. Walking to the tempo of her aimless song, Pearl wandered to the far corner of the couch and stooped. When her hand met bare floor, she stopped humming, and frowned at the empty spot on the hardwood. Her eyes trailed back to the pairs of shoes at the door, and then over to the basket of neatly folded laundry on the couch.

Head tilting at the basket, Pearl's frown deepened with puzzlement.

* * *

The remains of lunch grew cold on the plate in front of Connie. Per the chef's recommendation, she had selected the artisanal chicken fingers accompanied by oven-baked fries and served with a reduction of New England Catsup. She wasn't sure if it counted as a reduction just because she used less of it, but the food still tasted fine, and more of the meal ended up inside of her than in front of her, so she considered it a win. Her chef, glad to reduce the remaining total of ketchup, was cleaning his plate with his last fry.

Conversation had been spare during the meal, and Steven had done most of the talking, suggesting all of the things they might do in the coming days and weeks and months. Connie was having trouble keeping it all straight, and mostly just nodded at each new fun thing Steven could imagine. Eventually, he seemed to pick up on how overwhelming it must have been, and swirled his last fry through ketchup in silence.

Then Steven gasped, and cried, "A li—"

He croaked, clutching at his throat, and his face turned bright red. Connie scrambled off her stool and pounded on his back with a flat hand until he coughed up a half-chewed red fry back onto his plate. "Are you okay?" she asked, and rubbed at his shoulder.

Once the air was back in him, Steven wheezed, "A list!" He abandoned his plate at the counter to collect a notepad and pen. "If you don't know where to start, we should make a list of everything you want to do this summer. Then we can figure out where to start and how to do it!"

Connie brightened. "That's a great idea," she said. But her face dimmed as she recalled what happened when she had accidentally looked at the back of the ketchup bottle.  _Tomato concentrate. Sugar. Vinegar. Salt. Less than two percent organic spices._  "Um, could you write it down for me?" she asked as she gathered her dishes.

"Sure!" Steven said, and stood poised with pen at paper.

The beach house had no dishwasher, but Pearl kept one of those sponge wands with the soap in the handle next to the sink. Connie's eye drifted across the embossed logo on the wand handle—Magic Sponge—and her mind flashed back to every cleaning commercial she had seen over the past few days, which was collectively much more than she would have guessed. Shaking the flashback away, Connie began to wash her dishes, and said, "Top of the list: I want to be able to read or watch something without my brain vomiting up a playlist of everything connected to what I'm seeing."

Steven tapped the pen on the pad. His tongue poked through his teeth as he concentrated. "We should come up with a name for it. Right? I mean, I guess 'reading power' works, but it feels like it's lacking pizazz."

As she scrubbed her plate, watching greasy soap bubbles trail after the wand, Connie thought about how quickly she'd zoomed through her reading list, and how this new ability reserved all of her brain space any time she didn't think about it, and about the awesome cleaning power of  _Magic Sponge, The Sponge That Makes Dirt Vanish_ , though that last was involuntary. "Booking," she decided.

"Oh, that's good. Wha—" Steven looked up as he finished writing, and his words stumbled. Hurriedly he collected his own dishes and brought them to the sink, and then found a dish towel so he could dry as Connie washed. "What else?"

She sighed, and the breath sent a plume of soap bubbles wafting out of the sink. The tiny bubbles drifted in front of her, swirling in the gentle puff of her breathing. "I have to get a handle on any more 'windcidents.' Can't go around huffing and puffing people's houses down by accident."

"Okay. What else?" Steven said coaxingly.

Connie shrugged. "I mean, that's all I really need, isn't it? At least as far as power stuff goes. I want to be able to not accidentally destroy stuff just by being around."

His face tightened, and he looked down past his hands toward the hem of his shirt. "It's not just about not destroying stuff, though, right? I mean, that part is pretty important, and honestly it's still kind of hard for the other Gems, now that I think about it. But you should also focus on all the stuff you want to learn to do now that you have a gemstone too."

Connie felt her whole body tighten around the square stone in her chest. She knew what Steven was saying, and she knew he meant well. But that didn't change the truth.

"It's not my gemstone, Steven," she said quietly. As much as she might want to harness the powers of Jade's stone to become the kind of heroic legend she had always dreamed of being, to be the sword-wielding storm goddess her father had joked about the day before, she didn't feel right to want such a thing, or even imagine it happening. Jade hadn't sacrificed herself so Connie could play superhero.

Steven winced, and mumbled, "Sorry."

A pang of guilt made her body coil harder around the stone at his apology. "It's okay, Steven. But the plan before was to remove the stone from my body. Maybe that should still be the goal." She felt sick saying it, but the rational part of her knew it was still true.

"Well…" Steven wiped hard at a dish until his towel squeaked on dry ceramic, his eyes cast down at his hands. "Well, until we can do that, maybe you should still know how it works. Maybe if you understand it better, you can help us figure out why it's in you at all, and…and how we can take it out, if that's what you think is best."

Connie wanted to cheer Steven up from this accidental funk she had dragged them both into. And for all she knew, he was right: knowing more about how Jade's gemstone interacted with her, and learning more about it, might help them remove it later, and would definitely help her not summon a hurricane the next time she sneezed. And maybe, just maybe, if that let her learn how to do all the cool things a Gem like Jade could do as a result…well, maybe that would be okay. Maybe.

"Warping," Connie said, and handed him the last of the dripping silverware. At his questioning glance, she grinned, and said, "I want to learn how to use a warp pad. It's so cool how you guys can go anywhere in the world anytime you want."

Steven hurried to dry and put away their dishes, and then ran back to his pad and began his list. "Yeah! What else?" he cheered.

Her smile widened. "Jumping, definitely. All of the Gems can jump crazy high, can't they?"

"Yup! Well, not so much Peridot, but yeah. C'mon, what else?"

His enthusiasm broke the last of her funk, and with the sink clean, she let herself get swept up in the new mood. "Shapeshifting!"

"Two thumbs way, way up!" Steven raised his hand and, scowling in concentration, he morphed his index finger into a second thumb.

His dysmorphic enthusiasm only lasted a few second before his finger reverted, but it sent her into a fit of giggles. "Totally. I want all the thumbs! I'll be Queen of the Thumb Wars!"

"Now we're talking!" Steven exclaimed.

As he pulled Connie back toward the couch so they could continue building their list, the warp pad chimed, and Pearl materialized from a beam of light with her spear in hand. When she saw the teens, the concerned look on her features evaporated, and so did her weapon. "Hi, there! Is Connie all settled in? Did you eat already?" Pearl called.

"Yes, ma'am," Connie answered. "To both! Steven's helping me think of everything I should learn while I'm here."

"Oh, wonderful!" Pearl said as she moved into the kitchen. "There's nothing quite like the feeling of a fresh new list to…" When she found the counter empty and clean, and likewise the sink, her words trailed off. She surveyed the immaculate room in a slow circle, her eyes narrowing in confusion.

"Everything okay, Pearl? Did you find any sign of the other Gems?" Steven asked.

"Yes," Pearl drawled, still lost in her search for something in the spotless kitchen. Then his other question registered, and she blinked. "Er, I mean, no. Nothing out there at the moment that I can find. I, um, need to go. You kids let me know if you need anything."

"Okay!" Steven called after her as the Gem left in a daze through the temple door. As it sealed shut, he scribbled a new line on the list. "We should add 'getting into the temple' to the list too. You won't have your own room, but if you ever need to get to a bubbled Gem or something…"

"Yeah!" Connie agreed. She wouldn't turn down a chance to explore the tantalizingly mysterious ancient stronghold of Earth's greatest protectors.

Tapping a pen on the pad, Steven said, "This is all just stuff the rest of us can do. What about stuff that only you can do? I mean, stuff that Jade could do?" he asked, correcting himself quickly.

Her brow crinkled. "Wind?" she said.

"And?" he said.

"Wind…blasts?" Connie said, thinking back to the disastrous first meeting between Jade and the Crystal Gems.

"And?" Steven insisted.

She thought about the beach ball Jade had propelled into the stratosphere. "Wind explosions," she said.

"And?" he exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air.

The grim memory of Pyrite's attack in Sanctuary flitted across Connie's thoughts. She remembered the razor-thin bursts of air Jade had used to cut into the massive Quartz. "Wind blades!" Connie shouted.

"That's what I'm talking about!" Steven shouted in kind, springing atop the couch cushion with excitement. "Hang on, I'm going to make a separate column for wind stuff."

* * *

Barefoot and clad in her pajamas, Connie waited outside the bathroom door, watching the sky change colors as the day came to an end. She bounced on her toes, too excited to keep still. A huge grin split her features in half.

The list was as complete as she and Steven could make it in just one day. It looped through her mind, indelibly stamped into her memory like everything else she read, but she was glad to have it. There were nearly three dozen things she and Steven had come up with, some of them real things that Jade or one of the other Gems could do, and some of them wild flights of fancy invented by one of them, as if Connie might dare the wind itself to do something impossibly cool.

"Next time I blow down the living room, it'll be on purpose," she promised herself. Still bouncing on her toes, she threw practice jabs in the air, savoring the tingle of excitement in her nerves. Her first day at the beach had passed by in a blur, and if she wasn't careful, the rest of her summer could fly by just as quickly. But she had a plan now. She had goals. And she—

—watched a gust of air rattle the screen door from the inside. And then another. And another. By the fourth, she realized that the wind was coming off her fists. Stuffing her hands under her armpits, she hugged herself and waited, growing still. Thankfully, the screen stopped rattling.

The bathroom door opened and Steven emerged from a cloud of steam, dressed in his own PJs and wearing a towel wrap in his hair. He grinned at Connie, not catching the worry in her face before she hid it behind a smile. Then his eyes bugged, and he backpedaled, slamming the bathroom closed again. As the door shut, Connie caught a glimpse of more towels on the floor, and an uncapped tube of toothpaste on the counter, and a messy array of shampoos and conditioners and body washes littering every conceivable surface. Hurried sounds of rustling came through the door as he called, "Just a minute!"

Connie backed away, her mouth pressed in frustration. Something brushed her shoulder, and she whirled, surprised to find Pearl lurking behind her suddenly. The Gem waited with a rictus smile on her face as she watched the bathroom door. "Pearl?" Connie yelped.

"Hi, Connie! Did you have a nice dinner?" Pearl asked in a thready voice, her gaze never budging from the closed bathroom door.

The last time Connie had glimpsed Pearl was just after dinner, when she and Steven had been deep in thinking of awesome wind tricks. Pearl had stalked out of the temple in something of a tizzy, taken one look at the sauce pans they had used to cook their macaroni soaking in the sink and the rest of their dishes already cleaned, and then fled back into the temple without a word.

"Yes?" Connie ventured.

"Good! Good." Pearl looked like a lioness coiled to pounce on some helpless gazelle. And when the door opened a moment later, she did pounce, bowling past Steven through the door frame. "Just a moment, Connie, let me—OH, MY STARS!"

Steven caught himself, dizzy from the Gem's rush. "Uh, hi? Pearl, is everything…?" By the time he had stopped his eyes spinning, Pearl was already vanishing back through the temple door on the far side of the house. "Huh. Okay. Well, the bathroom's all yours now, roomie!" Steven told Connie.

Connie leaned past him to find the bathroom straightened up and waiting for her. The counter was clean, the toothpaste capped, and the shampoos and conditioners neatly stacked in a basket next to the tub. He'd even wiped the fog from the mirror, though it was already gathering again in the steamy heat left over from his shower. "Thanks," she said.

Steven's smile faded, and he frowned. "Are you okay?" he asked.

With a start, Connie realized that her fists were still tucked under her armpits. Letting her hands drop, she said, "Yeah, I… I guess I'm just still adjusting."

"Adjusting is good. And it's okay if it takes some time." Steven's gentle smile returned like a sunbeam through parting clouds. Then his eyes trailed down, and his face brightened. "Oh, hey! Is that where that shirt went?"

Connie's stomach plummeted as she put her hand over the yellow star of her shirt, remembering that it was really Steven's shirt in the first place. For all the excuses she had invented to avoid giving him back the borrowed shirt, she had never considered what would happen if she took it with her to live at the beach house, which now seemed unbelievably stupid of her. "Oh! Right." She swallowed guiltily, tugging at the hem of the shirt riding above her navel. "I, um, guess you'll want it back. I can go change."

Steven studied her face intently as she fidgeted. Then he studied the shirt theatrically, humming and rubbing his chin. Finally, he leaned back and shook his head. "Wait, no. I must have been wrong. This shirt is definitely yours. My mistake."

She rolled her eyes. "Steven…"

But he remained adamant. "Trust me, I know my own shirts like the back of my pants. In fact…"

He ran to the kitchen and returned with a permanent marker. Bidding Connie to hold still, he stood behind her on his tiptoes. Connie felt a gentle touch move her hair aside, then fish out the tag of the shirt from its collar. The astringent smell of permanent ink kissed her nose, and then she heard the cap return to the marker, and her hair fell back into place.

"There. I put a 'C' on it so it won't get mixed up in the laundry. Not that it would, since it's so obviously not mine."

Connie felt her cheeks aching with the force of her smile as she turned back to him. "Thank you, Steven. You're a really good host."

"Why, thank you," he said, and curtseyed.

She ran her hands down the front of her shirt, smoothing the cheery yellow star as her stomach rose back up, helped aloft by a smattering of butterflies as she considered her best friend. "Is there anything I can do? I mean, to be a good guest?" she asked.

"What? No way!" he said. "You're a great guest."

"Sure, but…" She struggled to keep her knowing grin in check as she glanced at his sandals by the door. "It's like in  _Beauty and the Beast_. The old one, the cartoon. Do you remember the scene where Beast couldn't use a spoon, so Belle ate porridge from the bowl like he did so he didn't feel embarrassed?"

Steven's eyes sparkled. "I love that part!"

Connie knew full well that he did. "Belle did that so Beast would feel comfortable, even though she was his guest. So is there any way I can eat my porridge that would make you more comfortable?"

"Did you know that Beast's real name is Adam?"

"Steven…" Connie said reproachfully.

He shook his head. "Seriously, I can't think of anything. This is great!"

"Nothing? You can't think of even one little thing?" Connie teased.

"Not even the tiniest anything," he promised, crossing his heart.

"Because it sure would be 'neat' if I could think of something to do as a way to thank you for all of this," Connie said, leaning on the one word as hard as she could.

Steven's face underwent a brief war of uncertainty before he finally relented. "Well, there is one thing," he admitted, and winced in anticipation.

She made her face solemn, hiding her smile again. "Name it."

"We kind of—and it's not your fault, since you aren't usually here all the time!" he said quickly. "But we kind of have a looser vibe around here. Just about certain things. So maybe you'd have an easier time adjusting if you were just a little, teensier, tiny, itty-bitty bit more…"

"…messy?" she supplied.

He held his thumb and forefinger a hair's breadth apart. "I mean, maybe just a little bit."

Connie wandered back toward the couch, pretending to be lost in thought. Her hand came to rest on the edge of her open foot locker still resting on the coffee table. "Messier, huh? You mean, like this?"

And she snatched up one of her folded shirts from the locker, wadding it up in her fist and hurling it at Steven in one fluid motion.

Steven rocked backwards under the surprise attack, his shocked face disappearing behind the shirt wrapped around his head. By the time he pulled the shirt from his face, Connie had already armed herself with an armload of shirts, socks, and pants, and was strafing across the room with another salvo flying at him. He grinned, ducking a pair of rolled-up socks, and sprinted to the couch, where his basket of folded laundry had been left. "Oh, it's on now!" he crowed, and scooped out half the basket's contents.

She and Steven ran circles around each other, trading sartorial missiles and filling the house to the rafters with a storm of giggles. Furniture became cover, and then obstacles as they leapt and bounded, turning the room into a ridiculous battlefield.

As their laundry fight raged on, with spent ammo grabbed off the floor to be reused by both sides, the temple door parted. "—telling you, something is terribly wrong!" Pearl insisted, dragging Garnet and Amethyst each by an arm into the house. "The children are—Oh!" When she saw the laundry arcing through the air, littering floor and furniture, the graceful Gem froze in shock.

"Aw, sweet!" Amethyst shook off Pearl's numb grasp and charged into the fray. She leapt and blurred her form into white light, expanding into an enormous crocheted sweater made from thick purple fibers. The arms of the sweater snaked out to wrestle with Connie and Steven, and the hem of the sweater produced a lanky purple tongue as it flapped open to cry, "Banzai!"

"Looks fine to me," Garnet said.

Pearl answered with a long sigh of relief, sagging backwards against Garnet's chest.


	6. Half-Hollow

Connie sat with her knees drawn up to her chest as she watched the tide climb up the beach to nip at her bare toes. The water was dark in the clear night, and it colored the sand in front of her with a trace of white foam. Overhead, the entire universe loomed, a million-million-million possibilities, each one a point of light more brilliant than it ever could have been from her bedroom window.

When she stared up at the sky, it felt like she would fall up and away from the ground. The sensation of living at the edge of the world like this thrilled her, terrified her. Part of her wanted to fall just to see what would happen. Would she lose herself in eternity? Would she find herself? Find a new self?

She was up way past her bedtime. Anything could happen.

But one thought anchored her to the ground. She touched the heavy weight beneath her throat, letting her fingers trace its boxy shape as they had a hundred times before. And each time she did, she could feel the weight's true shape, the way it twisted and curled inside of her to form the same five words it would always be:  _it should have been me_. She wasn't supposed to be here, but she was.

She knew how excited Steven was to teach her all about having a Gem, about  _being_  a Gem. But Connie was never supposed to be a Gem, and she could never forget that. Not as long as she carried Jade's gemstone, and remembered that a Gem had given her life so that Connie could be there. It was hard to let herself be excited too, when she thought about the promise she had made to Jade that she hadn't been allowed to keep.

But she wanted to be excited. She wanted to learn all about being a Gem. She had wanted to learn everything there was to know about the Gems ever since that day Steven had caught her in his bubble. He had saved her life too, and brought so much more into her life than she ever knew possible.

Jade had only wanted one thing for as long as Connie had known her, and that was to be free of Connie's squishy, sloshy, gooshy human body. But keeping that promise, making that happen now, wouldn't do Jade any good. It would invalidate everything she and Steven had worked for to build their amazing summer together. It couldn't bring Jade back.

…could it?

Chasing the tail of her own thoughts, Connie stared out at the ocean. Her gaze flitted through the starlight dancing in the waves. Even with no moon, the water was bright and alive, reflecting the universe back at itself. And that made it possible for her to spot a shape bobbing far off from the shore.

Connie shot to her feet. For half a breath, she worried that it might be a swimmer caught in the undertow. But with a second's panicked observation, she realized that the shape was far too small to be a person. It was a square corner cresting the surface with each passing wave.

Curiosity tugged her a step closer, and wet sand crept between her toes. That object could have been any piece of flotsam. She and Steven had found umpteen hundred curios of refuse washed up in his front yard. But something told her that this was no pizza box lost to the tide. This was something important.

She bit her lip. It wouldn't be safe for her to swim it. Perhaps she could wake Steven, or knock on the temple door until one of the Gems answered. But the object might vanish back into the water by the time she found anyone. So, since she couldn't swim, she stepped out onto the water instead, wobbling atop the gentle rise and fall of the ocean as she trekked out from shore.

With awkward high steps, Connie teetered atop the ocean. It took her a while to gain confidence in her gait, but soon enough she was hopping each wave at a jog. Still, it felt like a long time before she finally reached the object. With the world rolling beneath her, she bent and hooked her fingers around the corner.

A book pulled free from the water, dripping in her hands as she examined the cover. Its color was indistinct, muddled by the starlight, but she could make out one of the words embossed on the cover:  _Jade_.

Connie fell to her knees, clutching the book to her chest, where it rattled against the square stone at her throat. As the ocean rolled underneath her, lifting up and soaking through her socks, she looked toward the horizon. More square corners were bobbing in the water. Dozens of shapes. Hundreds. It was impossible to count them all, because the stars grew dark out at the edge of the world, casting everything in shadow.

That's when it occurred to Connie that she might not actually be up past her bedtime after all.

* * *

Connie woke with a start. Her whole body seized, rocking her military cot onto two legs before it knocked back to the floor. She stared at the strange ceiling, her chest pumping like a bellows, her heart thundering in her ears, and tried to understand.

No, the ceiling was not strange. This was Steven's house. And that nest of blankets piled on top of a surplus cot was her new bed. She was supposed to be there. Slowly her breathing eased and her heart rate relaxed, and she sagged back into the tangled blankets.

For a long time, Connie tried to relax herself back to sleep. Maybe if she did, she could return to that unreal shore and find that book again. Was it real? Well, obviously it wasn't real-real. But was it something more than a product of her imagination? That beach had always been something special, a place created between Connie and Jade. It hadn't appeared to her since Jade had…

She tried to sleep, but couldn't. Something felt wrong, and it wasn't a new wrong. It was familiar, but more prominent now. Back at home, it had been a constant whisper among old comforts, a weight in her shoes that made her tired.

But the beach house was quieter than home. It was so, so quiet, with only the gentle sounds of the ocean. And because of that quiet, Connie finally understood what was wrong with her.

It was silence. Connie had silence inside of her.

For months, Connie had lived every moment of her life with someone else inside of her. Jade's voice had never touched her ears. It had lived in her mind. Even when the Gem had nothing to say, Jade's feelings, her every impulse, had pressed against Connie's awareness. Connie had been forced to make room inside of her mind for an entirely different person to share it.

Now that person was gone. Those thoughts and feelings that had seemed just like her own had vanished, and nothing had filled the empty space yet. Connie was half-hollow. She was alone. And in the quiescence of the beach house, that whisper, that weight in her shoes, now felt like a roar in her ears, like a slab of granite pressing down on her chest.

She suddenly became aware of dark eyes watching her from above. Turning her head, she saw a nest of curly hair disappear into a cocoon of blankets atop Steven's bed. A moment later, the hair emerged again, and the eyes returned through a gap in the blankets. "I wasn't staring. I promise!" Steven whispered.

A tiny smile broke through Connie's gloom. "Somebody forgot to tell that to your eyes," she teased in a soft voice.

Crinkles framed his eyes, belying a smile. Then they smoothed with concern. "Can't sleep?"

She shook her head. "It's…quiet," she admitted.

The blanket cocoon wriggled to the edge of the bed, peering down to Connie's cot below. "Since we're both awake, do you want to have a sleepover?"

Her smile widened, and a tiny laugh shook the slab pressing down on her. "I thought we already were," she said.

In answer, Steven crawled out of his cocoon. He rooted underneath his bed for a moment, and then slid off the edge of the loft to land on the couch just inches from the cot. A caterpillar-shaped sleeping bag fluttered behind him, landing draped over his head. "When I'm up there, we're in our rooms," he explained unseen, still fishing himself out from under the bag.

She could practically hear her father having a nervous breakdown at the idea of Connie sleeping within fifty feet of a boy, let alone fifty inches. "Obviously," she said.

"But if I'm down here, we can sleep together," Steven said, emerging from the bag. His eyes bugged, and he amended, "With each other. –next to each other!"

Connie tittered. The panic she imagined in her father seemed to be infectious. But it made the hollowness inside of her a little bit smaller. "That sounds great."

Steven wriggled into his bag, having emerged from his cocoon to become a caterpillar instead. His smiling face hung right in front of hers as he stretched out on the couch. "I've only ever had one sleepover before, and that was with the Gems. And we mostly just dreamed."

"it's my first one," Connie admitted. "Well, technically, Jade had one with Lapis, but I slept through it. What do we do besides sleep?"

"Ooh! How about we tell each other secrets? That's a sleepover classic. I'll go first!" He craned his neck, pushing his face forward until it was almost touching hers. "I'm really glad you're here," he whispered.

Her smile won the war, blossoming in full. "Was that a secret?" she asked.

His own smile turned sheepish as he pulled back onto the couch. "Not really. But I tell you pretty much everything already, so it's hard to think of anything." Then he settled into the cushions and waited expectantly for her turn.

Connie bit her lip, running through all the secrets tumbling around inside of her.  _I don't know what to do now that Jade is gone. I feel bad for wanting to still carry her gemstone, but I feel guilty for wanting it gone. I don't want to disappoint you, or her, but I don't know what I can do that won't disappoint you both. Somehow, even though I've never felt emptier, I have so many stupid feelings inside of me that I think I'm going to explode and ruin the lovely home you were nice enough to open to me._

Any part of that jumble would have been enough to send Steven running. It made Connie want to run, and it was inside of her. So she carved off the smallest sliver of it that she could, and only gave him a tiny piece of that.

"I want to be a Crystal Gem."

Steven blinked at her, confused. "I thought you already were," he said.

She shook her head. "Not just as Pearl's student. Not just as a human with a sword. If whatever's happening to me doesn't stop, if it keeps growing, then I want to use it. I want to protect the Earth." A little extra piece of the sliver escaped, and without meaning to, she added, "It was Jade's planet."

Steven's deep, dark eyes watched her. She could see questions brimming in his stare. But all he said was, "It's your planet too."

"Yeah," Connie said, breaking her gaze from his. "Anyway, that's my only secret. Sorry. Kinda silly, huh?"

"Let's do it." His voice was pure, undiluted Steven: earnest and clear. His eyes glittered in the dark. "If you feel like you need something to make you more of a Crystal Gem than you already are, then let's find it, or do it, or make it. Starting tomorrow, we're on a mission to make you a Crystal Gem."

The slab on Connie's chest lifted another inch. Blinking hard, her eyes growing warm, she whispered, "Can I tell you another secret?"

"Yeah!" he exclaimed in a whisper.

"I'm really glad I'm here too."

His grin lit the dark room like a floodlight. "Okay, now that we got that out of the way, we can get to the serious sleepover topics. Like, who would win in a fight: a gigantic ice cream golem, or a mutated spicy pepper kaiju monster?"

Connie laughed. "Why would they fight?"

"They're fire and ice. They hurt each other. And there's no lukewarm third monster to help them reconcile their differences. A tragic misunderstanding that grew out of control."

"Peppers are spicy because of capsaicin," Connie pointed out. "They'd still be relatively the same as the ambient temperature of their battleground."

"That's a major advantage for the ice cream golem," Steven noted gravely.

They talked long into the night, trying to one-up each other with the most profound nothings their sleepy brains could muster. Connie found it easy to keep talking, even as she had to struggle to stop herself from saying what she really wanted him to hear. What really mattered was just hearing him talk. It didn't fill the hollow inside of her, but it made it ache less.

Sleep reclaimed Steven first. The pauses between his wild hypotheticals grew longer, until he finally nodded off. Connie let him slip away, content to let him rest. After the tumult of the day, she felt ready for the same. And perhaps if she could, she might find her way back to the beach in her dreams, where that book might wait for her again.

_Tell the Crystal Gems that they need to be better. They won their rebellion, so I expect them to act accordingly as stewards of my planet._

They were some of Jade's final words, and they echoed in her mind. Connie could only imagine what the proud Homeworld soldier would have thought of Connie's "secret" to Steven. She would have cracked herself rather than move into the temple to become a Crystal Gem. But they were the only ones left to protect the Earth. And Flint, Milky, and Pyrite were still out there somewhere. Maybe given the extreme circumstances, Jade wouldn't hate her for it, as long as she saved the world.

Connie didn't get to be sorry, or feel sorry for herself. Not anymore. Jade had left her stone in Connie. And as long as Connie carried it for her, she would do what she could to protect the planet they both loved.

Moving silently, so as not to wake Steven, Connie crept from her nest and into the kitchen. The pad and pen they had used earlier still sat at the edge of the counter where Steven had left it. A litany of Gem powers and wind moves filled the page, as many as they'd been able to conceive of in an afternoon. Taking up the pen, she found room for two more lines, and squeezed them into the page in the tiniest letters she could manage.

_Be a Crystal Gem_

_Be a Jade_

She stared at the page, letting the new words scorch themselves into her thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, and for the shorter chapter. This was a tough one. We'll get to brighter shenanigans next time.


End file.
